Showing up

by Josh Barsch

Did you ever see the movie “Hardball,” the inspirational tale of Keanu Reeves teaching love and teamwork to a group of poor inner-city kids? Neither did I, but I caught about 10 seconds of it one day while I was channel-surfing. I caught the part where Keanu, tears in his eyes, tells his ragtag group that “One of the most important things in life is showing up, and I’m blown away by your ability to show up.”

I wanted to cry, too, because that’s some really dumb advice. It may fly for little children, but in reality, you’ll never get a gold star just for showing up. You actually have to do stuff and do it well after you show up in order to be considered a valuable employee. But that’s not necessarily true when in college.

More and more professors are making attendance a part of students’ grades. Some do it for egotistical reasons — their feelings are hurt when students decide it’d be more interesting to sleep than to listen to them lecture, so they require attendance. In other cases, parents pressure universities to require attendance, to ensure their hard-earned money isn’t paying for classes that their sons and daughters are skipping in favor of watching an all-day Simon & Simon marathon on TNT (not that I’d know anything about that). Regardless of the reasons, the outcome is this: you can now get a good chunk of an A just by dragging your tired bones into class in pajama pants and big fuzzy slippers.

And let’s not forget that the majority of college classes don’t even count attendance at all, especially at larger schools. You can make a total of two appearances all semester – one for the midterm and one for the final – and as long as you can perform well on those two days – that’s two days out of 110+ days in a semester – you can get an A. Obviously, this does not reflect how things really work at a job. You actually have to show up every day and on time, and when you get there, you have to work for about 9 hours straight, with an hour in between for lunch.

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Exams

by Josh Barsch

    • Acing midterms and finals is still the number one way to leave college with an excellent GPA. Exams are supposed to cover the most important concepts and skills that a class has to offer and reveal to what degree you’ve mastered all these concepts and skills. So why is it that test scores don’t necessarily give an accurate forecast of how good you’ll be on the job?There are several reasons, actually. There’s an incredible difference in the way “tests” are perceived in college, and in the world outside college. First, let’s get clear on what tests are supposed be: a yardstick to measure how much knowledge you have about some given subject at some given point in time. That’s pretty much it. Note that I didn’t say it was the final day of reckoning at the Crossroads, the day you must match wits with Satan himself about organic chemistry or Constitutional Law for the right to live the rest of your days above ground. It’s just a TEST to see where you are right now. And in the grand scheme of your life and career, “where you are right now” is very near the beginning.

      But the college system doesn’t treat you that way. It treats you – in every class, at the end of every semester – like you’re at the end of the line. Know everything by now, or else. Or else you’ll get a bad grade. And because of that, students go about their learning process differently. Instead of learning as many concepts and skills as they can for the long-term, they do something different: they start preparing for tests.

      If you’re a college student now or have been a student any time in the last 10 years, you know what I’m talking about. Rarely does a student (and I’m speaking for myself here, too) attempt to read, learn, synthesize and retain all of the material in every course’s syllabus. Believe it or not, that’s what most of our past generations of college students were expected to do – learn everything the teacher covered in a semester, because you never knew what was going to be on the midterms and finals when they rolled around.

      That almost never happens now. Most professors tell you what’s going to be covered on the big tests. Many will even review some questions from the actual test with you. Many will hold big review sessions during regular class hours – the class hours you’re paying them to teach you new stuff, not old stuff. Some will even GIVE YOU THE DAMNED TEST so you can go home and study it. That’s right – they give you a piece of paper with some questions, you go home and find the answers to those questions, you come back the next period and transfer those answers onto the same piece of paper, and voila – you get an “A” on the test.

      Now, many of you are undoubtedly saying, “Yeah….so?” And I probably would’ve said the same thing when I was in college – whatever freed up my time to drink more beer and meet different girls was fine with me. But my point here is different: it’s not to stop partying and start studying all the time – far from it. The point is, if you’re going , you might as well be studying something useful that you’ll remember, rather than 40 questions on a test that you’ll forcefully shove out of your mind once you’ve dropped the answer sheet on your professor’s desk.

      There isn’t too much professors can do about this – it’s simply the way the educational system is set up. The one remedy that’s sometimes available is the ability to take a class on the pass-fail system, rather than for a specific letter grade. I have long been a big proponent of pass-fail classes, and still recommend to any student to take a class pass-fail any time you can. But I’ll talk more about that later.

    • What are the possibilities? You have a low GPA — definitely leave it off. You have an average GPA — why include it? What does it add to your application? It’s strong — ok, but it’s still just GPA, and employers know that the stuff you did to get that GPA are very different from what you’ll do at a job. You don’t go to work from 9-10 and 2-4 on MWF and 12-3 on T and TH. Work is different.

      Exception — if you have a really, really high GPA, like summa cum laude high or a 4.0, maybe you should include it. There’s still a “wow” factor there, because the likelihood is your boss didn’t graduate with that high of a GPA, and it still impresses some people. That said, remember that most bosses know that your GPA doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a good employee, worker, whatever. Worst, least knowledgeable person I ever had to work with was a 4.0 student, undergrad and grad school.

      Yes, but: Some students and parents (especially parents) think I hold GPA in low regard because I never had a very good one myself, and that I’m simply giving you the “I never had a good GPA, and look at me now!” line. Sorry, wrong answer. I was the salutatorian of my high school class with a 3.96 (we didn’t have those highfalutin’, five-point AP classes in Box Elder, South Dakota, thank you very much), and I got my B.A. in English with a 3.9. Am I bragging? Not at all – just telling you from personal experience that a high GPA means very, very little to anyone outside of your dinner table. In fact, let me punctuate this point with a final anecdote:

      One of the biggest regrets I have about my college education is dropping my French minor. I loved studying foreign languages, and to this day, I still do. But in the middle of my French III semester, I abruptly dropped the class. Why? Because I thought I was going to get a “B” and that would hurt my GPA. Let me be clear here: That decision was asinine beyond words. I cannot describe how stupid it was for me to do that. Never once, in the history of my life, has anyone asked me what grade I received in French III. Ever. But because of that choice, there ended my formal French study. There ended my quest to master that beautiful, romantic tongue – to saunter off to Europe and meander through France, Switzerland, Belgium, wooing lovely francophone girls into jelly with my rugged American exterior yet oh-so-cultured mastery of le francais.

      But thanks to my absolutely silly pursuit of few extra hundredths of a point on my undergraduate GPA, my French stinks. I’ve been to Montreal and Paris and stammered like a fool each time, relying only upon the locals’ goodwill toward English-speakers to get by (lots more of that in Montreal than Paris, by the way). Oh, well. I was in Paris on my honeymoon anyway, so I guess my wife would’ve put a stop to any lovely-French-girl wooing even if I could’ve managed some.

      Don’t be like me. Learn what you want to learn and forget about the GPA. You will never, ever regret it.

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A Wealth Of Personal Activities

by Josh Barsch

If you like to water ski, or play shuffleboard or crochet dog sweaters, good for you. As an employer, I don’t give a damn. If this resume is truly your one-time, one-page, rehearsed best effort, then your personal interests don’t belong anywhere on it. If you can’t talk about yourself for one measly page without bringing up the fact that you like jet skis and golf, then you’re probably not the right person for the job.

Yes, but: But aren’t your personal interests an expression of your “real self” – the person behind the paper, the human being that these people would be interacting with every day if they were to hire you? Yes indeed, and that’s another reason to OMIT the personal information, regardless of how wonderful a guy/gal you think you are.

Here’s what you’re forgetting: On a personal level, your boss may be a complete jerk (this has been known to be the case – just ask anyone who’s ever had a job). He may like what you hate and hate what you like. He may annoy you, and you may annoy him. Your love of reality TV may lead him to think you’re a nitwit. Your passion for three-wheelers may bring to mind those little bastards who ride their Razor scooters up and down his street at night, robbing his hard-earned sleep.

So why risk bringing up such irrelevant things in the first place? After all – and this is the most important part – no one who needs help on the job badly enough to necessitate hiring someone is going to hire you based on the things you do outside of work. It’s what you can do for your boss on the job that will get you hired.

After reading the previous pages, you may think I’m a complete stiff who’s totally against having fun at work. Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact, I’ve always made my job as much fun as I possibly could and encouraged everyone around me to loosen up and do the same. But I do after I’ve already gotten the job.

There’s a time and place for your personality to come out. That time is after you’ve got the job, and that place is the water cooler, lunches, meetings, etc. Once the papers are signed and you’ve got a paycheck, that’s the time to get to know the people in your office. You won’t like everyone, and everyone probably won’t like you, either. But that’s fine if you’ve already got the job – working with people you don’t like is as inevitable as death itself. You just don’t want them ganging up on you beforehand and convincing the boss that you aren’t worth hiring in the first place.

Here’s a real-life example: if someone sent me a resume and included the

. Same goes for social Greek organizations, and most service ones, too. If you had big leadership roles in the organizations, OK, but if not, skip it. An employer is thinking, how can you help me? And these things don’t help.

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Fraternities And Sororities

by Josh Barsch

  • Everything I said about personal interests also goes for social Greek organizations, and also most service fraternities. SomeYes, but: Aren’t fraternities and sororities great for networking after college is over – including job-market networking? Yes, they’re definitely great for networking. And I must confess that I never joined a fraternity, so I don’t have personal knowledge of exactly how far a frat-brother connection will go in the way of landing you a job. My conversations with Greek friends and acquaintances, however, indicate that such a connection is sometimes enough to get your foot in the proverbial door. In light of that, I might make one exception to the above rule: If you’re applying for a job where you know that one of your fraternity/sorority members works and has hiring discretion, then you may want to sneak your affiliation onto your resume. Again, I emphasize this approach only for jobs where one of your Greek brethren has some pull. Otherwise, in a normal job-opening situation where you’re going in cold, fraternity and sorority membership won’t impress the person reading your resume.

    Yes, but (Part II): “Greeks do lots of charity work, so my association with a fraternity or sorority is relevant for that reason.” It’s true that Greeks do a lot of charity work, but charity work is not the reason for their existence. So you can’t claim a “halo entry” for a fraternity the way you could for, say, working at Habitat for Humanity. Most of your employers have been to college, and whether we were Greek or not, we know that the primary reason a person joins a fraternity or sorority isn’t to do charity work. There’s plenty of charity work out there that doesn’t require pledging, hazing, and dues. And that’s not a knock on Greek life at all – to each his own – but let’s call a spade a spade.

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High School Stuff

by Josh Barsch

  • Almost without exception, you should not put high school achievements on your resume. Unless you cured a disease or saved the world from certain destruction and have the newspaper articles to prove it, leave this stuff out. Why? Because things were different in high school. You were competing against a hodgepodge of 16- and 17-year-olds thrown together by the caprices of geography. Many of those teenagers had no interest whatsoever in competing with you for grades, awards, honors, etc. Some others dropped out altogether to (pick one) join a gang, deliver pizza full time, follow Phish around the country, or smoke cigarettes at the mall.The fact that your accomplishments bested those of your above-mentioned peers five years ago is not impressive to a present-day employer. It’s not that you can’t still feel good about it. Hey, I still treasure my high-school discus medals and that time I took third out of 150 competitors in an English Literature competition. But I don’t put it on my resume, because no one who sees my resume would care.

    The reason you don’t include that stuff is that you’re into a much higher level of competition now. Everyone you’re competing with wants exactly the same thing you want: the open job. And there aren’t any slouches competing with you anymore – those guys smoking cigarettes at the mall (yes, they’re still there, five years later) are not the ones competing with you now. Everyone you’re up against has a similar background, education and skill set. Because of that, it’s important that you emphasize your recent accomplishments – ones that you’ve carved out for yourself against your current crop of competitors, rather than people from the past who weren’t really breaking their necks to compete with you in the first place.

    Yes, but: “What about major accomplishments, like becoming an Eagle Scout?” There are indeed some accomplishments that mark a person for life, and garner praise for many years – even decades – after they’re earned, even if they’re earned during a person’s high school years. In this case, I’d make an exception to the above rules and include the accomplishment on your resume. For example, there’s no way I’d leave “Eagle Scout” off my resume (especially since I dropped out of Cub Scouts the first time they asked me to tie a knot).

    There may be other awards that carry similar weight, but I’m not aware of them, so your decision whether to include such an award in your resume will be up to you. But before you take the natural step of assuming your award or accomplishment is prestigious enough to include, ask yourself one question: When you tell people who don’t know you about your award, do they have to ask you to explain what that is? Or is it an accomplishment, like Eagle Scout, that everyone instantly recognizes? If it’s the former, then it probably doesn’t belong on your real-world, job-market resume.

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Education Is A Commodity

by Josh Barsch

Ever hear the talking heads on CNN discussing the stock market and talking about the “commodities market”? They’re talking about stuff like coffee beans, wheat, corn, etc. We call these things commodities, which means there isn’t much difference between coffee beans in Africa or Jamaica or Guatemala. Sure, there are subtle variations in quality and flavor, but at end of the day, a bean is a bean is a bean. It’s not like the difference between a Ferrari and a Ford Fiesta.

So, where does your education fit into all this? Is a college education simply a commodity, the same everywhere? Well, yes and no. It’s what you make of it: what you decide to learn and master while you’re in college determines whether your education is a Ferrari or a clunker. But in terms of the way you represent that education on a resume, it’s pretty much all the same. Everyone applying for your job probably has an education of some sort, and your resume entry probably looks like this:

Bachelor of Whatever
Wherever State University, 2002

As you might guess, there isn’t a lot of difference between these entries: only the names, places and dates change. And as we discussed earlier in this book, when everything looks the same, it starts to mean less and less, and your prospective employers just tune out the entry altogether.

Here’s the deal about the education section of your resume: In most cases, it’s hastily scanned at best, and even then, it’s just to make sure that you actually have an education of some kind. Very rarely will anyone assign massive value to the school you came from; at the same time, it’s just as rare that you’ll be overlooked because you went to a smaller or lesser-known college.

Let me repeat that for the millions of parents out there who have children wanting you to spend an extra $50,000-$100,000 on a “name-brand” school. You will not be overlooked for a job because you didn’t go to a marquee school. Some of the greatest people I ever saw came straight from community colleges, and some of the most useless came from the Ivy League. Trust me – your future boss will not run to check your school’s ranking in the U.S News & World Report college rankings to help her decide whether you’ll be a useful employee.

On the other hand, let’s look at experience. The variety of different people’s experiences is absolutely unlimited. Each job has a different title and is performed at a different company and has different responsibilities and tasks that must be carried out every day. Two candidates who have exactly the same Bachelor’s of Whatever from the University of Wherever may have vastly different levels of experience. One may have done little more than make coffee and sort mail at her internship, while the other may have taken on a great number of critical responsibilities at his. As you may have guess, we employers tend to give much greater weight and respect to the latter.

Yes, but: I can already hear you now – “But I don’t have any experience!” Bullshit! Of course you do – you just don’t realize it. Everyone has experience of some sort. Have you lived in a cave for the last 20 years? If not, then you have experience. Here are some examples:

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More Great Advice No One’s Given You

by Josh Barsch

Use a real email address. Do not spend hours putting together a great resume and then ruin your professional image by putting down

phatbootyshaka@aol.com or demonicoverlord420@yahoo.com.

Or even goyankees@, andyaknowdis@msn.com.

Sign up for a new Yahoo! or Hotmail address that is firstname.lastname, firstname_lastname, etc. Use it for all job-related correspondence. Piggy Forgetful,

use graphic and a nice-looking font for your header.

Keep different resumes for different types of positions

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A Photo: To See, Or Not To See?

by Josh Barsch

When I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri, few topics of discussion generated the ferocity of debate as the question of whether you should attach a photo to your resume. For most readers, this is a completely new idea. It’s rarely mentioned in any books on the subject, and ten bucks says you’ve never had a career counselor mention it to you.

For me, there’s no debate at all: you should definitely attach a photo if you’ve got a nice one. But I’ll present both sides of the argument below, though I make no promises about shielding you from my bias (because I’m right and they’re wrong).

First, let’s set some parameters. When I say “photo,” I mean a professionally done headshot. Not a Polaroid, not a snapshot of you on vacation, not even a candid of you in formalwear cropped from the neck up. I’m talking about a professional headshot that you can get done for about $39 from any photographer in your town. If you’re a man, you wear a jacket and tie in the photo. If you don’t have a jacket and tie, borrow one from someone you know for an hour while you get the picture taken (then go buy one, because eventually you’ll need one). If you’re a woman, wear a “smart business suit,” as the magazines call it. If you don’t have one, borrow one, or go buy one and return it the next day after you get your photo taken.

Why would you attach a photo to your resume, anyway? For one, it’s simply a good way for the employer to put a face with a name. Another reason is a simple fact of life: Appearance counts; in fact, it counts a lot. That doesn’t mean you have to be an Adonis or a beauty queen to get a job – let’s face it, if it did, our unemployment rate would be MUCH higher than it is.

No, it just means you have to tend to your appearance when you’re trying to get a job, even if you rarely do at any other time. If you look good, clean and well-groomed, then you’ve automatically made a good first impression in that area. And from an employer’s perspective, there’s something nice about knowing what the person’s going to look like when he/she walks through the door for the interview.

Here’s another, even simpler reason to include a photo: Resumes with photos stand out immediately and are always remembered. 99 percent of people don’t include them, so those who do burn themselves into your future boss’s memory almost instantly.

WARNING! POLITICALLY INCORRECT SUBJECT MATTER AHEAD!

You can’t address this subject completely and honestly without addressing the subject of physical attractiveness. Someone always mentions that attractive men & women use photos to gain an advantage that’s unmerited, and also debases the job itself by attempting to artificially inject sex appeal into the job criteria. This argument always reminds me of a survey that’s released every so often about what regular people would do in certain ethical situations. The following question or a similar one always seems to come up:

You’re offered a job that you really want. You have yet to accept the job when you’re told that part of the reason you were hired is because of your physical attractiveness. Do you still take the job?

Most people say yes. It’s a rare person who turns down a job because someone thought they were pretty. Or studly. Or whatever.

How would you answer that question? Never mind, I don’t really care. The point is, if you’re like a majority of job-seekers, you don’t care if your looks work to your advantage from time to time, so the fact that this might occur probably shouldn’t deter you from including a photo of yourself when you send out your resume.

Yes, but is it fair? Honestly, questions of “fairness” like these are of almost no interest to me whatsoever. One of the first things I can remember learning from my parents is that life isn’t fair. They were right, and everyone knows it. Is it fair that tall men are promoted to executive positions at a far higher rate than short men are? Of course it’s not. But it still happens, and that really stinks if you’re a short guy. At the same time, you don’t find many tall men sawing off their legs at the knee just to level the playing field, do you?

The playing field isn’t completely level – never has been, never will be. Princes are embraced more often than frogs. Way it goes.

I say, it’s better to confront this slanted playing field up front, and you do that with a photo. If I’m going to lose out on a job to an equally competent woman with great legs and a short skirt, then that’s life – and I’d rather know it up front. The alternative is for me to fly halfway across the country to interview the job, rent a hotel, rent a car, do a fruitless interview, fly back home – and STILL lose the job to my sexy peer. Think about it – if the person making hiring decisions will discard your resume based on your photo, do you really think he/she wouldn’t do the same after seeing your mug in person?

if you think it’ll help you get the job, do it, professional-looking pic. some say that if you’re a woman or an ethnic minority (your’e not white), it encourages others to be filter you out based on bias. i think that if someone’s not going to hire you because you’re black or a woman or Hispanic, then they’re not going to hire you when you show up in person, either. My opinion. Also, there’s bias of looks. But would you take a job on something other than merit? Up to you.

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References Available Upon Request

by Josh Barsch

This runs neck-and-neck with the Objective as the most annoying, ubiquitous, aggravating mistake on resumes today, both for new as well as experienced job-seekers. Why is it such a big deal? First let’s recall some important things that we’ve already learned: You’re competing with hundreds of other people for this job, and the employer already has a stack of resumes on her desk that’s taller than she is. They’re busy, OK?

So along come you and your resume. You’ve read the first part of this book and listened up good, so after 95 percent of the resumes met Mr. Shredder, you’re still in the running. Good for you!

And so the boss woman is reading over the finalists. Your resume looks sharp. Great achievements, all meat and no fat. A cornucopia of marketable skills. Impeccable spelling and grammar. Her eyes continue down the paper to find a bold-faced header titled References. “Excellent,” she thinks. “This Chris is a sharp candidate. I’m glad she included some references, because an endorsement from a former boss or two is just about all I need to make my decision.”

And then she sees you’ve tricked her. You added a References header…but you were kidding. There are no references here – instead, there’s that detestable line of text that says, “Available on request.”

Let me tell you, briefly, why this is an incredibly stupid thing to do.

1) Everyone has references “available upon request.” I know very well that I can call you and ask for references if I feel like it.

2) It’s arrogant. It’s like saying, “On the off-chance that you’re not already astounded by what a dazzling job candidate I am and aren’t ready to just hire me on the spot, sight unseen…then I don’t know, I guess I could give you some names.”

Not likely! Of course we want to see some references. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll actually call them all – maybe so, maybe not. Depends on how busy we really are. But if you didn’t even bother to include any in order to give us the opportunity – then you’ll end up in the garbage.

3) Employers are busy as it is. They don’t have time to bother with trying to contact you an extra time to get information you should’ve included from the beginning. Think about it: Is it really smart to try and force the employer to track you down and ask you for more information?

If you actually think so, remember this: there are other strong resumes on my desk – resumes that include references. I could choose another strong candidate, call his references right now, hire him, and still get out of my office before traffic gets bad.

Or I could try to call you and get some of these “upon request” references. Maybe I’ll reach you – but maybe I’ll get your voice mail. Or your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your mom, your dad, or your roommate. Maybe I’ll leave a message (or maybe I’ll just say forget it and hire the other guy). If I do leave a message, maybe you’ll call back before I leave the office, but maybe not. And then when I come to work tomorrow, I’ve got another thing on my to-do list that I should’ve cleared off yesterday – and it’s all because of your damned “references upon request” entry on your resume.

So again: What would you do if you were me? You’ll hire the other guy, because he’s thorough and he had a lot more respect for my time than you did!

4) Why’d you add a “References” section to your resume if you weren’t really going to put any down?

5)      Employers are busy as it is. They don’t have time to bother with trying to contact you an extra time to get information you should’ve included from the beginning.

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Internships

by Josh Barsch

For students who are still in college, internships are the most popular form of experience on a resume. There’s a good reason for that: just about every business out there loves interns. Adores them. We love interns because you’re cheap! Hell, a lot of the time, in the case of unpaid internships, you’re not just cheap, you’re absolutely free. And it’s not the type of free labor you get from prison chain gangs or DWI convicts doing community service work. You actually want to be there, you’re smart, you’ve got some preexisting knowledge about the business, you’re busting your hump to prove you’re worthy, and oh, by the way, you work for less than the guy who cleans the bathrooms. Or for free.

Because of this, internships abound, and probably always will. Which brings me to my next point: don’t rely on your department office, or your career counselors, or even the Web, to give you a listing of all internships out there, because they can’t. They’ll give you the high-profile and long-established ones, but that’s it. It’s very, very easy to not just find little-known internships, but to create them yourself. Your ability to do this depends on your willingness to take a pauper’s wages for your work, but that’s pretty much status quo for most internships you’ll find. Here’s how you do it:

Decide where you want to do an internship. Look around the company’s website for the highest-ranking person in the department you want to work for. (If the company’s small and doesn’t have a website, call and ask for the owner or general manager. When he/she gets on the phone, ask their name. Then hang up. Now you know!)

Next, go to the company’s office — physically, take yourself down to the office (and bring your resume). Ask for the person whose name you’ve just discovered in the previous paragraph. When they emerge, tell them briefly who you are, and that you’d like to give them your resume. Then say this:

”I’m Jane Doe, and I’m a student at Wherever State University. I’d love to do an internship here, and I’m willing to work for minimum wage helping you out in any way you need me to help out.”

You’ve got a 50-50 shot repeating the above. Your chances increase greatly by modifying the approach to:

”I’m Jane Doe, and I’m a student at Wherever State University. I’d love to do an internship here, and I’m willing to work for free, just to gain the experience and a resume entry, helping you out in any way you need me to help out.”

No matter how presumptuous it may be to simply barge into someone’s office and hand them your resume, the prospect of free labor is an aphrodisiac that very few businesspeople can resist. Add to it the fact that you’re obviously a bold and enthusiastic volunteer, and your chances of getting work go through the roof.

Of course, I understand that some people have bills to pay and can’t devote a great deal of time to volunteering. But remember – an internship that takes 5-10 hours a week fills up space on a resume just the same as one that takes 35-40 hours a week. If you can trim back your activities just a bit here and there, maybe you can make it work.

Including internships. Some students say, “Yeah, I did an internship, but it was unpaid.” And then, for that reason, they don’t put it on their resume. Are you nuts? Of course you put it on your resume! Did you learn any less because you weren’t paid? Did you do any less?

It’s not just paying jobs that make experience. It’s not even just volunteer jobs. If you have experience doing something, put it down. Put education first only if you have absolutely no relevant work experience.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t take internships if you can. They’re certainly the easiest and most common way to get some real-world job experience while still cocooned away in the college environment, and by all means, if you’ve still got the time and opportunity, do one (or more).

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