The final push before graduation has me thinking about a phenomenon I have dubbed the Magical Post-Collegiate Compression. Let me explain: As fourth-years, we tiptoe toward the finish line because once we hit it, four years of college dissolve into a handful of forms, lines on a transcript and sections on a résumé.
This sudden and irreversible reduction of a significant portion of one’s life into a few documents is the Magical Post-Collegiate Compression. It’s possible I need to come up with a name that better reflects panic, instead of fun card tricks or hugs — perhaps the Magical Shrinking College Career or the Law of Diminishing Fun.
For many, this process begins long before May 17, thanks to the horror of applications for grad schools and jobs. In addition to testing the very limits of your soul, they force you to sum up your life so far, put it in an envelope and mail it off for someone else to judge.
The hard work of college might pay off, but not nearly as much as it should. All those lectures and midterms and finals are reduced to a limited handful of letters and numbers — and not the kind that sing songs and teach lessons, like their educational cohorts on “Sesame Street.”
Every time you went to office hours, every insightful comment you made in class — none of that shows up on your transcript. And the non-academic memories? Well, there’s not even a check box to make sure you have them, much less a blank for description.
Likewise, all your perceptive, well-researched papers are no longer the standard by which your writing is judged. Instead you get to answer application essays, or as I like to call them, “the places where creativity goes to die.” They come in two varieties: the bland (“Tell us something about yourself.”) or the ridiculous (“If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? And if, as a tree, you fell in the forest, who would hear you and why?”).
I recently had to answer the absurd question of what book I expected to be a best-seller in 2020. I was stumped. Harry Potter and the Mid-Life Crisis? I don’t like being judged about my ability to predict the future. It’s so unfair when my DeLorean is in the shop.
The only thing worse is the monolith we call the résumé. This document haunts all fourth-years. We don’t have dreams of diplomas and mortarboards; instead, we are plagued with nightmares of dancing skill sets and objectives. I often wake up in a sweat wondering if I’ve got the dates wrong on my summer job or if I’ve forgotten to mention that I work well in groups.
One fear is that your résumé can never describe you, that it will fail to accurately summarize all that you have been and are and want to be. But the scarier possibility is that it succeeds, that you are, in fact, nothing more than this piece of paper.
On a résumé, compression is at its most ruthless. College is merely dates attended, GPA, major, minor, maybe relevant coursework. Speaking of which, where’s the SOC listing for Fine Arts of Résumé Padding? The magic of the résumé is that if you work it right, it can also expand your skills and qualifications.
It’s a mythical eight-and-a-half by 11 space where working at Quizno’s makes you a “sandwich artist” and shelling out muffins at Starbucks qualifies you as a “pastry chef.” I’m wondering if I should list my high school job as “amateur paramedic” instead of “lifeguard.”
Even with all the padding, a résumé tends to boil down to the kinds of attributes that were marked on your elementary school report card — plays well with others, follows directions, doesn’t push kids on the playground.
This kind of lowest-common-denominator assessment means that most of us end up looking both low and common. It’s hard to be unique inside such margins.
But don’t get too depressed. There are other ways to show the admissions officers and HR workers of the world what a unique little snowflake you are. An interview, a recommendation from a professor, the rare clever essay topic — each of these is an opportunity to prove you’re more than just a number.
Failing that, you may have to resort to spicing up your résumé with whimsical typefaces, colored paper and those old self-inflationary tactics. Or there’s always Plan B: Live in a box.
Rebecca’s column runs biweekly Tuesdays. She can be reaced at r.marsh@cavalierdaily.com
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