“It’ll look good”
October 7th, 2006 RachelDo you ever remember having a moment in high school (or now sometimes even middle school or younger) when you did something pretty cool or achieved something pretty big and said something like this:
“Wow, that’s so great - it’ll look really good on my resume.” I did.
One of the things I enjoyed most about my time in high school was theater. A few months into my first year at a new school I volunteered to participate in a public speaking competition…before asking the question “so what do we do at one of these?”.
Partially theater, mostly thinking on your feet, the four times I got to participate were some of the best memories I have of that “era” (oh gawd, I’m getting old). I enjoyed it…and I wasn’t half bad at it. I know that at the very least after the first time I walked back to my seat with a little trophy in hand and a grin as wide as can be, a teeny piece of my brain was thinking about how great this would look on the paper version of my deeds and accomplishments.
Which then makes me wonder, five years later, why I didn’t think past the resume and contemplate how this experience might influence the actual career the resume got me. Assuming that self confidence probably played a part (easy to picture yourself writing up the resume, but you got to believe in yourself to think you’ll “get the job” someday when you’re an awkward sixteen), I think there’s more too it. There’s far more books selling on how to write a killer resume than how to reward yourself after you’ve gotten the job (Though Wildly Sophisticated, one of the confidence boosts I found randomly while in University, comes pretty close.
Anyway, this nostalgic contemplation all came on because in the last two weeks I’ve had the opportunity to speak on two panels at two very different conferences. Me, twenty three year old, getting her feet wet me.
When I wasn’t giddily passing along the conference website with my name on it (among about fifty others - I won’t do so here, there’s a narcissism line, I believe), I was thinking back to how the time I spent studying monologues, practicing impromptu speaking and reading “meaningful” passages out of books (example: Paul Reiser) - not to write it on a resume, but to have a giant, enthusiastic ‘YES!!!” sitting in my back pocket when opportunities such as these would come up.
Think beyond the resume, and never do things “for” it. What you love and what you’re good at while pave the way itself, without the accolades and ribbons to prove it.
