Resumes and Cover Letters – Page 7

Wordling the heat wave away

Dr. Joseph Barber

It is hot outside, if you haven’t noticed, and so it is a perfect time to wordle the day away in the cool oasis of an air conditioned room. OK, “to wordle” isn’t actually a verb. It is way to make one of those nice looking “word cloud” images, and you can do it right now by following this link. I’ve made my own word cloud for a chapter I recently wrote for a book about chickens. The larger the words in the cloud, the more frequently they appeared in my text. It shouldn’t take you long to guess the general theme of the chapter I was writing (hint: it was definitely about chickens, but also about their cognitive abilities, intelligence, and learning capacity within their social environment).

Thrilled as you might be (and should be) to learn about chickens, and to have a new toy to play around with when it is hot outside, you might be wondering why I am even writing about this. How could a word cloud help you seek out your next job or career? Well, one possible use for this approach is to see what common themes arise from your job application materials. Copy and paste the text from a cover letter, teaching philosophy, or research statement using the Wordle website, and you can get a glimpse at the type of language you are using to define yourself – the common terms that you use the most. Are these the types of terms and descriptions that the employer is looking for? Copy and paste the words from a job description itself, and from the “about us” page of the institution’s website, and you can create a corresponding word cloud that may point out the terms most frequently used by the employer. The goal in any job application is to try to describe your past and present experiences in the language used by your future employer so that they have an easier time imagining you working for them. What that could mean is that the most frequently used terms in your word cloud should overlap to a certain degree with their most frequently used terms.

OK, Wordle is not really a tool that is designed to compare your job application materials to job descriptions, and chances are it may not be as useful as I would like to imagine it could be. However, it always helps to get an objective perspective on the way you are portraying yourself to potential employers, and Wordle will give you an honest assessment of how frequently you use certain words to do so (you also might like to stop in for an appointment with an advisor – our offices are deliciously cool). Besides, it is certainly better than standing out in that insufferable heat. That is something that only mad dogs and Englishmen would do…, which probably means that I should get my coat and hat and find somewhere where I can get a decent cup of hot tea around here.

Get your brain on your team

Dr. Joseph Barber

Your brain is a funny old thing – filled with wonder, awe, mystery, and lots and lots of squishy parts. Some of you are currently studying very specific parts of the brain, and so you probably have a fairy good sense of how it all works at the cellular level. However, outside of your research, when you are busy thinking about applying for jobs and future careers, your brain can sometimes be a bit of a wild card – working in ways not necessarily predicted by action potentials and neurotransmitters.

Take this video showing a rather interesting visual illusion as an example: http://youtu.be/h4OWa-drek0

In this case, the brain ignores what is blatantly obvious, and tells us something completely different (and wrong). It does it for all the right reasons, but still! If you don’t pay attention to the things that your brain is thinking to itself, then there is a risk that what should just be a private thought or feeling becomes something more overt and apparent. When we start unconsciously sharing our feelings with employers, we should definitely be concerned.

What I see a lot of when I am advising students and postdocs is the brain projecting doubt and uncertainty into people’s job application materials – without them even noticing. This doubt often stems from being unsure whether a new career path is the right one (e.g., when looking at non-academic jobs after years of assuming that being a faculty member at a university was the only path). Alternatively, it comes from people looking at a job announcement and thinking about all of the ways that they are not qualified for the position (as opposed to seeing the reasons that they are a great match given their education and experience). This doubt can lead to phrases like this popping up in cover letters:

“Although I don’t have direct supervisory experience, I did coordinate the internship programs within out lab for three years”

Your pessimistic brain sees this and nods in agreement. An employer reads this and also nods in agreement that you don’t have direct supervisory experience (those are your exact words – why would they argue with you?). A more optimistic brain would see this and realise that focusing on the negatives is not going to do you any good, and that coordinating an intern program is actually a form a supervisory experience. This optimistic brain might suggest (and career advisors would agree) that a better approach would be to simply eliminate the first part of the sentence. Your new approach could then be:

“I coordinated the internship programs within out lab for three years, providing supervision for all new arrivals and training lab members on the protocols we used for involving interns in the research”

See…, it is as simple as that. Get it into your brain that your diverse experiences and perspectives can make you very qualified for the majority of the positions you are probably interested in, and your brain can showcase your abilities in the best light possible. In most cases, you are best served by ignoring the negatives and focusing on the positives. This only works when you really do see how your positive traits can be valued by others (based on how they have helped you get where you are today), and so it is always a good idea to take stock of the skills and attributes that are unique to you, and transferable to the careers that most interest you. Not sure how to explore the inner you? Well, take a look at some of the resources here as a first step, and then come and see an advisor at Career Services to talk more about this.

Everything Counts. Really. Everything.

I have often been surprised by how students classify “experience” in their minds. Some assume that in resumes, only academic information and paid work belongs. In cover letters, some limit their sentences to mention only directly connected work or projects – of which, for some jobs, there may be little. For interviewing, several candidates have asked me – quite recently, actually – if they are “allowed” to talk about experiences not on their resume, even when those may be the best example they have of a particular skill.

My response to these students – and you, if you think there are things you “can’t” include for whatever reason – is to be creative and use those critical thinking skills honed over years of education – consider including everything about you that could possibly be related to your career path. Everything. And don’t worry, we can edit later!

Perhaps you were a camp counselor or lifeguard, but don’t mention that work because it’s not “related” to what you’re studying and the internship to which you are applying. Or, if you tutored a family friend in a subject because he asked – does that belong? Maybe you have been very much involved in social and club experiences that may not be connected to your field of study. It all may have a place.

The best way to determine whether or not an experience or activity of any type is worth including is to ask yourself “how did I develop a skill or demonstrate a personal characteristic while involved in that endeavor?” As a camp counselor, were you were responsible for overseeing younger campers (leadership) and planning recreational activities (organization) and had to assist one of your charges in an emergency situation (problem-solving)? For more social or extracurricular activities, did you plan an event (organization again) as part of a committee (team work) for which you created fliers and a Facebook event (marketing/advertising/social media) and that drew 50% more attendees this year than last (quantifiable achievement)?

As you prepare your resume, cover letters, and answers for interview questions, and especially if you are not certain about what “belongs” in your applications or what you can mention in an interview, please come to Career Services. We’re glad to help you think through this process, at whatever stage you’re in!

You Snooze, You Lose…..

By Barbara Hewitt

I’ve been thinking this week about how life speeds by…. The job search used to be a somewhat leisurely endeavor. Job seekers would find a job posting in a newspaper or other printed source, mail a resume and cover letter to the organization, and perhaps be contacted weeks later to arrange an interview. (I realize this is an extremely hard scenario for most current students to even imagine, but it is actually how I conducted my first job search out of graduate school!)

These days, however, the response can be almost immediate. This was reinforced to me last week when I took a phone call from a recruiter late Wednesday afternoon requesting an on-campus recruiting visit for the following Monday. Although I was a bit skeptical that we could turn around the process so quickly, the recruiter ended up interviewing almost 50 students during his visit to Penn and actually had to schedule an additional day on Tuesday to meet with all of the interested applicants. On a more personal front, we had an individual apply for a position in our office on Thursday and we were able to conduct a Skype interview with her on Friday. Skype has made the interviewing process much less costly and time intensive for both interviewers and candidates. The immediacy of feedback can be gratifying for job seekers who are quickly called for interviews. The downside, clearly, is that the large volume of digital applications employers receive results in many candidates never being contacted at all about positions if they are not considered strong candidates, which surely can be disappointing.

The moral of this blog post, however, is that effective job hunters must act quickly on an opening once they learn of it. Just because a job posting is scheduled to expire weeks or months later doesn’t mean that employers will wait that long to select a candidate – they often begin their interviews immediately. Smart job seekers will have their resumes polished and updated and be able to send them out relatively quickly. Of course, keep in mind that a slight delay is preferable to sending out sloppy, mistake-ridden materials, so do take the time to proofread your resume and cover letter thoroughly before hitting the submit button. (This lesson, too, was reinforced last week when I received a thank you email from another applicant addressed to someone I’ve never heard of….not the kind of impression one would hope to leave in thank you correspondence!)

Where Do I Start???????????

By Barbara Hewitt

The internet is a terrific resource for job seekers, making information on job openings, employers, and job search techniques instantaneously accessible to all of us. The down side, however, is that the amount of information can be overwhelming. Luckily, Margaret Riley Dikel has provided a terrific resource through the Riley Guide to help you sort through all of this!

The Riley Guide is a regularly updated directory of employment and career information resources available via the Internet. It provides instruction for jobseekers and recruiters on how to use the Internet to their best advantage. While she links to job hunting resources on topics like writing cover letters and resumes and interviewing, I most appreciate her A-Z index which makes finding specific links relevant to your particular search a snap. Click on ‘N”, for example, to find resources for your nonprofit job search or “E” if engineering is your passion. The RileyGuide has loads of links, so you will still need to do some searching to see which might be the most useful for your personal job and internship search, but it is a terrific starting point.