Insignificant Wranglings

Today’s Plan:

• Schedule Reminder / Homework
• Resume Principles
• Looking at Resumes
• Revising Your Resume
• My Normal 75 minute Resume Lecture / Workshop

Schedule Reminder

Monday, Nov 15th: Final work day with Community Engagement Teams. Homework: Revise your Community Engagement Project. Polish up and submit a resume draft to Canvas.

WE ARE HERE Wednesday, Nov 17th: Revising Resumes–focus on content (note: I am assuming you can come to this class session with a resume. If you don’t have one already, then it is time to make one; the project is designed to address how to *revise* resumes). Why you need two different versions of your resume (plain text and polished design). Why polished design does not mean wacky Microsoft template. Homework: finish up revising your Community Engagement Project.

Friday, Nov 19th: Cover letter crash course. Homework over Thanksgiving break: find two job advertisements OR internship opportunities. Use B&L’s coding scheme on those advertisements to identify as many codes your job materials need to address as possible. Over break, draft a cover letter for one of these positions.

Monday, Dec 2nd: Peer-review cover letters. Homework: revise cover letters based on peer feedback.

Wednesday, Dec 4th: Shall we wrestle with Linkedin? Revising resumes-focus on design.

Friday, Dec 6th: Peer review resumes.

During exam week: you will submit your resume and cover letter to me. I will also distribute a short course reflection survey.

Ten Minutes on Resume Principles

My normal resume lecture takes a full 75 minute class session. You will find it below. We don’t have time for that; I’ve included it below so that those of you who are close to the job market can go through it later. Instead, I am going to try, very quickly, to gloss what I think is important on a resume.

A Quick Scan: I like simple, minimalist resumes with strong hierarchy and contrast. In many cases, the best resume is one that a human being can skim quickly and learn the most important things about you. Sure, you have to be prepared for the machine and loaded with key words (think B&L Coding Scheme), but you also have to be prepared for the 8 second scan.
Thinking About Real Estate
I want you to think about how to order your resume, what headers to use, and in what order you want to organize material. In terms of potential sections, you might have:

• Objective Statement
• Education
• Work History
• Relevant Experience
• Skills, Technologies, and Competencies [Pick one, two, or all three!]
• Relevant Coursework
• References

But how should you order those sections? In the order of your strengths. Note that having a college degree might not be the most impressive thing about you. Many people have a college degree. Is your GPA a 3.75 or better? Okay, then maybe put education first and include your GPA. Otherwise, I would hope that you have work or relevant experience to highlight before your education. Remember: 8 seconds, quick scan, what do you want me to see?

Let me share a template.

Thinking About Bullets
Everyone knows that when you write a resume, you have bullet points with a list of duties and obligations. WRONG! You should have bullet points with a list of tools, technologies, professional competencies, and personal characteristics. I know where we can find such a list!. But, beyond B&L, the list of keywords you incorporate into your job advertisement should come from two places:

• The advertisement
• The “About Us” page of the corporate website

“Wait, Santos, wait. It sounds like you are suggesting that every version of our resume should be tailored to every job to which we apply.”

Yes. YES. That is exactly what I am telling you. You don’t rewrite the whole thing, but before you hit send, you look at the job ad and the website and identify how you can edit your resume to incorporate their terms. This is especially important in an era in which companies are using scanning software to vet resumes, because they are likely generating their own lists of keywords for the scanning software to identify. So if they, on their website, talk about how “At Hellscape Inc we really value people people! Folks who know that good work comes from good relationships,” then I would not write “Interpersonal skills” on my resume. As in, working the cashier at Boba Tea required interpersonal skills or

Boba Tea

• Developed interpersonal skills to greet customers

I’d write

Boba Tea

• Cultivated positive relationships with customers to help increase sales

My Normal 75 minute Resume Lecture / Workshop

Rhetorically Constructing Resumes

When I teach resumes at the undergraduate level, I emphasize the importance of an rhetorical approach. Rhetoric here means two things to me:

• First, it means that I attempt to read what the other person wants, thinks, values, and prioritizes
• Second, it means that I approach the situation without an expectation of control or mastery, that I understand that the situation calls for a calculation of risk

I contrast this rhetorical approach to the more “philosophical” approach that tends to drive the advice one would get from career services or from many resume books and websites. Philosophical approaches try to teach hard and fast rules for developing materials. Do this! Don’t do that! They are often more concerned with their own preferences; and thus overwrite the wide chaos one finds in ads with a more simple and controlled framework. They also tend to be more conservative when it comes to voice, tone, and content. I am skeptical of this kind of “cookie cutter” approach.

Rather, I think you should approach your job materials less in terms of a baking recipe and more in terms of playing a poker game. When you play poker, the cards you hold are important. But equally important is your ability to read your opponents, and to make sure that you adjust your play based on theirs. You cannot plan out a poker strategy before you play the game–you can have ideas, certainly–but those ideas have to be re-calibrated once the game starts and you begin familiarizing yourself with the players.

In terms of a job search and the construction your materials, it is useful to have drafted in advance a resume and a cover letter. But the resume and cover letter you send to a potential employer should always be transformed based on the position for which you apply. As I talked about in the smaller groups on Wednesday: in an era in which we are fighting algorithms to make sure our materials make initial cuts or receive high compatability scores, you want to make sure as much language from an add shows up in your materials as possible. Manipulate headings and terms to match the language you find in ads.

But these transformations shouldn’t be merely cosmetic–you should create content that you think speaks to that particular organizations needs. I’ve been on the job market twice in the past 15 years, and both times I started with a default letter and CV. This doesn’t mean I recommend writing a completely different letter for every job. I don’t, no one has time for that. [job letters-unc (teaching new media and tech writing), msu (digital rhetoric research), tamu (classical)]. But I do recommend spending time reading an ad carefully, thinking about how you arrange material, and making sure that the language you use in a letter matches up with the language you find not only on an ad, but also on an organization’s website (mission statement, about us, projects). Your resume and cover letter should show organizations how you can use research and rhetoric to craft more compelling prose.

Rhetoric is the art of adapting a message to a particular audience, of recognizing the affordances and advantages of a particular situation. It always involves elements of risk and chance. I believe job searches are particularly arbitrary–there is no system or pattern to what employers look for because every employer, every human resource director, is different, and brings to the process her own preferences, methods, and attitudes. The best we can do is to learn to analyze, listen, and think through possibilities–to be aware of the potential choices we have and to make precise calculations for every position to which we apply. While we can’t be certain, we can do our best to know our audience(s), and to tailor ourselves to their preferences.

Some Practical Advice that May Even Be Useful, in Some Situations, Some of the Time

Okay, with those rhetorical reservations in place, let me tentatively offer some advice. First, we need to make sure we are designing resumes that are ATS (applicant tracking system) compliant. This is probably the biggest change I have had to deal with in the 15 or so years that I have taught resumes–the increasing difficulty and prioritization of designing a document that 1) can “beat” the machine and 2) is still persuasive, compelling, and/or readable to a human being. The advice 10 years ago focused on the importance of keywords (previous link). So does the advice today . I think our Project 1 Coding Sheet is a great generic resource for identifying keywords–but be sure to code any advertisement to which you plan on applying to see if you can identify idiosyncratic language. Also, preparing resumes for ATS has implications for style and design. (Note: see tool at the bottom, see Common mistakes, short video).

In the 2010’s the fad was to use fancy templates. To create highly graphic resumes. Visual resumes are still a thing. I still think these have a place, especially if you are applying for visual-design jobs. But I am skeptical of a lot of Canva, Microsoft, and even InDesign templates for job materials. Many of those templates are designed for a very precise amount of content. And that means that when you use that template, you end up having weird gaps, spaces, or crams. They look weird instead of showing design skill and attention to detail.

So let’s assume that we’ve beaten the machine. Now our resume is in the hands (or more likely on the screen) of a human resource director or a manager who needs to wean a stack of 20-25 candidates down to a stack of 5 for interviews. Now we might have to beat the dreaded six second scan.. But beware keyword stuffing!

Let’s close this section with a review of some generic but staple resume advice–a few Squawkfox articles.

Plain-Text Resumes

Beyond ATS preparation, there’s a movement towards plain-text resumes. There are documents with no formatting–bold, italics, bullets, etc. Such documents take ATS formatting to the extreme.

Sample Resumes.

Wright, Dol, and Collins (2011). See sample resume description [could this go in a resume or a cover letter? Top of the resume for a person? Or bottom of a resume? Where to position this?]. See Wonderlic.

Another resource to help identify strengths/compatibility: Big Five personality test.

Here is my heuristic/template for starting a resume

• How to Reframe Service Experience
• How to Reframe Customer Service on a Resume

• Am I passing this resume to a human or submitting it to an algorithm?
• Should I use a design template? A content template?
• How should I organize my resume? Work Experience? Education? Skills?
• Should I submit a .pdf or a docx? [Note: only use a .pdf if you know how to OCR]

If you are submitting to a human, then I would likely suggest you have a non-plain-text resume-either a designed resume or a simple, clean text resume (like, for instance, the boring template I provide above). If you are submitting to an algorithm, then I recommend a plain-text resume. These days, you should have both prepared.

I would only use a template if you feel confident in your ability to edit said template. It is better to play it safe than to use a template poorly.

You should organize the material in your resume to put your most impressive content first. That might be your education. But it might not be. Do not feel compelled to put your GPA on your resume (and I would only list it if you are a 3.5+). Do not feel compelled to put every job on your resume.

Old rules dictated that a resume never extend beyond one page. I don’t think that rule works in a digital, algorithmic age. BUT, prioritize what goes where.

An objective statement allows you to repeat the job title. They are not necessary. Some people love them, others see them as a waste of space.

There’s no need to list references. But, if you have empty space, then they do not hurt. I’d rather see a list of skills.

Today’s Plan:

• Eyman Project
• Haraway Context/Reading
• For Next Tuesday: Haraway Write-Up

Eyman Project

We’ll start this on Thursday. I want to do one more difficult reading first.

For Next Session

A rather long and complicated (but rich) essay. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Let me try and provide some context. The essay opens with:

This essay is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to
feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as
blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identifica-
tion. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things
very seriously.

Some questions:

• Why ironic?
• Does “political myth” here mean “ideology” (probably?)
• What is the opposite of feminism?
• What is the opposite of socialism? (Duh, capitalism–that’s an easy one)
• What is the opposite of materialism? [Essentialism, but what is essentialism]
• What is up with blasphemy?

Let me also pull up the course description to this course:

This course explores emerging scholarship on writing and design technologies. Beyond exposing students to applications that they will encounter as professional writers, the course explores the ontological, epistemological, material, and ethical transformations that new communicative technologies engender.

Let’s talk through those three terms across Haraway’s terms.

• Ontology: What is real? How do we know something is real? From whence [where/when] comes reality? [And the big question here is transcendence vs materialism]
• Epistemology: What is knowledge? [and, ontologically: does knowledge exist, from whence comes knowledge? The concepts can get messily intertwined] What are the sources of our knowledge? What do we know? What differentiates knowledge from wisdom and opinion?
• Ethics: From whence come morals? How do I decide what to do when morals come in conflict? To whom am I obligated? What are the extents of my obligations? How do we balance obligation and personal freedom?

Okay, one last set of terms and concepts:

• Self: This is messy. But let us say that the self is conscious-self-recognition of who we are and what we vaule. To become a self is to be self-aware. To be an agent capable of independent thought and action. The Modern Enlightenment (think: Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche kinda but maybe not) sought to emancipate individuals from the tyranny of dogma, to be free thinkers. To mature, to become selves. Let’s read.
• Subject: Subject is a postmodern term that responds and often critiques the idea of self. How? Let’s talk.
• Agency: Let’s talk.

Okay, a few more terms / concepts.

What is an Oedipal narrative? This is a psychoanalytic term that comes from Freud’s reading of Oedipus Rex. I want get into the weird Freudian reading. But in Haraway it is meant to signal a narrative of male empowerment, one in which a man is able to solve his problem, win a woman, and save his world. For Lacan, the Oedipal desire is caught up in a desire for Symbolic Order, to inhabit a world that is structured and ordered, to live in parallel with what the world orders. Which, um, no one ever does (thus, in the eyes of the Father, the representative of Symbolic Order, we are always, already pervert, deviant, bad child).

A Quintessential 20th century question: what is technological determinism. In short, that technology drives social change, that it becomes if not the sole force directing history, at least the driver at the front of the bus. In “QCT,” Heidegger suggests that technology reshapes how humans think of themselves and the world. But he also sees the possibility of humans reshaping technology and their relation to it. We might say that for Heidegger, technology reshapes but does not determine. Most “hard” techno-determinists were more fatalist, and more Marxist, and feared that technology was quickly becoming a force that could not be resisted or reshaped. Even “soft” techno-determinists saw it as the central agent of social/political practice. Take Lelia Green, a scholar of the mythos of what she calls technoculture, writes:

“This ‘idea of progress’ or ‘doctrine of progress’ is centralized around the idea that social problems can be solved by technological advancement, and this is the way that society moves forward. Technological determinists believe that “‘You can’t stop progress’, implying that we are unable to control technology”

While Haraway will argue in favor of cybernetic ontology, epistemology, and ethics, she is *not* a techno-determinist, and believes techno-determinism is an Oedipal fantasy of control and order (the Father will save us / there are no fathers, only sons).

One last thing. How can we fit Heidegger into the matrix I’ve laid out above?

Ontologically, Heidegger has little belief in “essences.” Heidegger is a materialist in the sense that we build the world and the way we build the world in turn builds us. There’s no permanent essence of human being uniting us across time and space. To be human is to be in an ever-changing emergence of human being. Humans become in a material world they have constructed, and the way they constructed that world changes what they become.

I do not think “Question Concerning Technology” has much to say about the epistemological questions above. But clearly Heidegger influenced writers like Lyotard and Bill Readings, which in turn influenced (pretty heavily) the rant that I read you in class. My ideas about learning (as a becoming) rather than teaching (as a transference of knowledge) are rooted in the Heideggerian inflection of “being” as a verb, of becoming, and its rejection of “being” as a permanent essence or existent. (This is Levinas’ language: that we are not existents but are always transformed through the act of existing).

Ethically, Heidegger pushes for a local relationship. Remember that his interpretation of the fourfold thinks creating as a local act, “a gathering” of materials, purposes, users, cultural value, etc. We do not create merely to sell and profit. We create to gather those around us, to show our care for the very act of creating and the “world” that offers us the opportunity to create. Our obligation is to that world. The world is not transcendent, it is not a God to whom we owe reverence. But is it an entity, a greater whole, to which we owe care.

I lay this out because I think you will hear traces of Heidegger in Haraway.

Next Tuesday: Haraway reading and write-up.

I leave you to imagine your own question for this write-up. Haraway’s essay is complicated but, I think, rather inspiring.

I have one requirement: in a paragraph, spend some time with a 3-5 sentence passage. Close read it. Pick it apart. Look up some terms. And think about some way, any way, that we can put it in conversation with ChatGPT.

If you cannot think of an AI question, here’s one. Take this rather long sample from the near the essay’s conclusion:

Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centered polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases—all crucial to establishing modern identity. In the evolutionary and behavioral sciences, monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late-twentieth- century industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and
limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.

There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an
aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible
for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.

Here Haraway celebrates how the relation to the machine might liberate women (and men) from the pre-existing gender roles that structure their relation to technology and, in turn, themselves. She implicitly associates this relation–woman and machine–in terms of the historical “monsters” (some fictive like the Centaur, some real like the hermaphrodites) that, through opposition, reinforce what it means to be a real, healthy man.

Okay, if you are still with me, then think about what she is claiming in the bold passages above. And think about whether you believe AI would be potentially liberatory in the ways that she frames “the machine” throughout the essay (and especially in her descriptions of women and/in science fiction).