Take us to your professor.
Since the time of Galileo, astronomers have pointed their telescopes at the heavens and asked, “Are we alone in the universe?” Now, that same question is being posed by historians, political scientists, psychologists and sociologists who don’t use telescopes but the more elusive instruments of the soft social sciences: research, oral history, theory and, finally, conjecture.
Recently, popular culture has been suffused by man-made aliens. From television shows like “The X Files” and “3rd Rock From the Sun” to movies like “Independence Day” and “Men in Black,” from the ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle claiming the car has been “reverse engineered” from UFOs to commercials in which ETs promote Hostess Ding Dongs, Quisp “the qwazy energy cereal” and Chilis restaurants, we can’t seem to get enough of these alternately adorable, wise and terrifying but always slimy creatures. They’ve even starred alongside Kenny, Cartman, Stan and Kyle in the premiere episode of “South Park,” called “When Cartman Gets an Anal Probe.”
Academia has usually been a haven from crazes involving paranormal phenomena, but now there are signs that alien nation has finally caught fire within the once cool walls of the ivory tower. In July, Stanford University professor emeritus Peter Sturrock and a panel of scientists from Princeton, Cornell and the University of Virginia reviewed a series of UFO reports. Their conclusion? Although the incidents had nothing to do with extraterrestrial intelligence, the panel called for more thorough investigations and criticized scientists’ reluctance to study UFOs. In April, Cornell University Press published “Aliens in America” by political scientist Jodi Dean, who teaches at Hobart and William Smith colleges. And in the fall of 1999, the University of Kansas Press will publish an anthology of UFO essays, written by professors from Johns Hopkins, Temple and Eastern Michigan universities.
Peculiar though it may be, the marriage of aliens with academia should come as no surprise. A university experiment first gave rise to the contemporary notion of aliens back in 1947. UFO mania kicked off in the United States that year on June 24, when amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold said he saw nine mysterious objects flying at supersonic speed across the Cascade Mountains near Mount Rainier. The press dubbed them “flying saucers” and the phrase stuck. Later that summer, a ranch foreman, W.W. Brazel, found strange, shiny material scattered near Roswell, N.M. Military officials called the debris a fallen weather balloon but some believed it was a flying saucer containing aliens. The story gained so much momentum that in 1966, Rep. Gerald Ford headed a congressional panel that looked into UFOs that included testimony by scientist Carl Sagan.
The Roswell sighting resulted from a classified experiment developed by scientists at Columbia University, New York University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The team worked on “Project Mogul,” a program designed to search for evidence of nuclear blasts, according to an Air Force report. The fallen debris came from the broken balloons and radar reflectors.
Since then, academia and UFOs have remained blessedly separate. Until now.
Despite ufology’s stigma as an area of study for Weekly World News suckers and backwater eccentrics, a growing number of academics are risking their careers to come out of the extraterrestrial closet and openly study UFOs.
The best known and most controversial is Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who uses hypnosis to determine if people have been abducted. Once the crème de la crème at Harvard, Mack built its psychiatry program from scratch and won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1977 biography of psychoanalyst T.E. Lawrence. Now he could be considered crème brûlee. Mack’s colleagues view him as an embarrassment and make no bones about it.
“I disagree with his conclusions and think he’s totally deluded,” says Dr. Paul Horowitz, an astronomer at Harvard who is currently working on the SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project.
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Mack burst onto the scene in 1994 when he published “Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens.” Although he wasn’t the first to write about abduction (that honor belongs to Whitley Streiber, author of “Communion”), he was the first academic to venture into the field armed with heavy credentials.
The book grew out of his relationship with Budd Hopkins, a New York artist and sculptor who runs a free support group for abductees. Hopkins, who had written three bestselling books based on testimony from his support group, began sending many of his self-proclaimed abductees to Mack for intensive interviews and investigation.
But these studies and the publications that chronicled them ultimately proved fatal to Mack’s academic career. Eventually, he quit teaching at Harvard and now runs PEER, the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research, a nonprofit, privately funded organization that researches alien abduction. The organization publishes a newsletter and offers a referral service to licensed therapists.
If Mack is the founding father of ufology, Dave Jacobs of Temple University may be its revolutionary son. He believes that aliens are trying to colonize America by breeding with humans. He did his doctoral dissertation on the UFO controversy at the University of Wisconsin, which was published by the University of Indiana press. Holding a conversation with Jacobs can be a frustrating experience, because he is armed with a flotilla of abduction stories he is quick to share.
In an utterly sincere voice, he tells me that aliens are conducting a program of physiological exploitation, where they are seizing human sperm and eggs to create hybrid alien babies. Their goal is to colonize America, and Jacobs predicts the integration will be a peaceful one. And then his voice falls. “I don’t like this. I hate this and I’m frightened by it,” he says, referring to the turn his career has taken. “If I had done other research I could have had a life. It’s hurt my life and my career. Even my kids are ridiculed in school.”
While Mack and Jacobs have willingly lent their names to UFO research and have become the stars in this scorned little galaxy, they are not alone. But their fellow ufologists can be as elusive as the aliens they are trying to find. As with many marginalized subcultures, ufologists are sometimes clannish, secretive and reluctant to speak with outsiders. Some hedge at merely acknowledging that a “scene” exists; one insider whispered that it was like being part of an “invisible college.” In fact, ufologists tend toward paranoia. Before granting me an interview, most grilled me on my attitudes toward extraterrestrial life and its scholars. In the end, many people declined to comment on the topic despite their having attended UFO conferences and published papers on the subject.
David Pritchard, a physicist at MIT, offers a case in point, although he was kind enough to grant me an interview of sorts. He’s conducted research with aliens, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. “It’s not like I go babbling to my colleagues about my interest,” he says. Reluctant doesn’t even begin to describe him, and cantankerous would be generous. In 1992, Pritchard and Mack held a conference where they examined people claiming to have alien implants. They found no evidence. When asked for details on the conference, he yelled, “Get the book!” And while Pritchard admits a subculture exists, he’s mum about the members. He became extremely agitated, and shouted, “I’m not going to talk to you about the culture and I’m not going to give you any names!” Gauging from his reaction, you’d think this was the 1950s and I was asking him to rat on some communists.
Gradually, though, I began to get a glimpse of the field as a whole. Ufology is interrelated to the point of being incestuous. It’s like following a choose-your-own adventure novel. Start with one person and it will eventually lead back to Mack. Along the way, ufologists bash each other and credit themselves with starting a movement or particular idea. After weeks of calling ufologists all over the country, I came away with another peculiar observation: These people seem to hate one another. Given that their common interests have put their jobs and reputations at risk, you’d think they might stick up for one another.
Perhaps this is best explained as guilt by association. Indeed, most of the professors I interviewed seemed to have a love/hate relationship with UFOs. They say they regret their decision and the ridicule that comes with the stigma of studying UFOs, but they continue to follow the path to Golgotha. “It’s fair to say my job marketability has decreased,” says Ron Westrum, who teaches sociology at Eastern Michigan. “I can pretty much count on not moving up in my department.”
If ufology is so scary and such a career stopper, why do it? For one thing, it’s a way for professors to claw their way out of their second-tier colleges and obscurity. If books like “The Celestine Prophecy” and “The Horse Whisperer” can make the New York Times Bestseller list, then aliens are a shoo-in. Schlock sells, and professors know this.
One example is the ultra-excitable Jodi Dean of Hobart and William Smith colleges. Her book, “Aliens in America,” explores how and why aliens have captured the popular imagination. As a woman in an almost exclusively male field, she is an anomaly. But more remarkable still, she wrote the book before tenure and was recently awarded the Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship. Dean says she was drawn to aliens because her first book, on feminism, had an audience of “about five people.” Of course, a cultural anaylsis of aliens in popular culture and actually saying aliens exist are two different things.
While her book was recently panned in the New York Times Book Review for endorsing the culture of paranoia, Dean argues persuasively that the current alien craze was ignited by the 1986 Challenger Shuttle explosion. Until then, she maintains, space represented freedom, adventure and prosperity. But when an ordinary woman like Christa McAuliffe was killed by her venture into outer space, suddenly the heavens again became a threat. The following year the first abduction book hit the shelves — Streiber’s “Communion” — and abduction theory was born.
While aliens translate into fun and profit for some professors, they infuriate others. Astronomer David Helfand of Columbia University says that he becomes exasperated and depressed when people claim to have seen aliens.
“It’s a sign of the rejection of knowledge as a valuable thing,” he says. “People are retreating into magic, myth and superstition.” Helfand says that while there could be life on other planets, “it doesn’t imply they regularly visit Earth nor have sex with humans. It’s total and utter nonsense.”
While traditional scholars can bemoan the deterioration of academic standards, scholarly ufology may be only the beginning of a cottage industry that takes aliens and their visits to earth as absolute facts. Recently, a teacher named Leah Haley wrote “Ceto’s New Friends,” a book aimed at children ages 4 to 8, to teach them how to cope with their extraterrestrial visitors.
Between August 1995 and May 1996, residents and friends of residents of H College Apartment #119 consumed more than 200 doses of
LSD. No person or experience between that time and now has
failed to be colored for me by the things I saw and said and heard in those
incandescent mornings, nights and afternoons. Occasionally I still wake
up from wild fractal dreams, the ozone stink of my own terrified sweat
filling the room, sure I’ve fallen into the acid space my friends and I
once named Perimeter.
We were freshmen, 17 or 18 years old, living away from
home and parents for the first time in our lives. The building that we
lived in became our identity, the mark that set us apart from the rest of
the school. We went there to read, get high, hang out, have sex, cook
wretched meals of ramen and canned corn. We went there when there was
nothing else to do, nowhere to go, when we wanted to simply be, and yet we
complicated Being. We established slogans: “When you’re not going anywhere,
you’re going to 119.” “There is that which is the source of
motion, and to which all motion returns. The Apartment is the Unmoved
Mover and the destiny of men.”
Perimeter meant land between the Self and Other, Sane and Mad, the
Mind and World. These dichotomies, and thus the schematic possibility of
our drug-mediated adventures, were taught by our professors. We threw our desperate enactment of them in their faces like an accusation of their age,
a testimony to our courage. No one could be strong who didn’t ride along
the edge of madness, testing intellect against the unexplainable. We were
the young Americans pondering infinitude with what we held to be tremendous
energy. Nighttime and daytime were dreamtime, and the kids who went to
class and went to sleep and didn’t go to the Apartment were the weak, the
small, the uninitiated.
One month Becky and Ramien tripped every day; they
kept a journal more and more obsessively, then summoned everyone to witness
an improvised ceremony on the last day. We crouched on the concrete
porch of the apartment building. Ramien laid pieces of wood
scavenged from the corners of the storage area deliberately into a
hexagonal pile. Becky spat thrice: into the woodpile, off of the steps
and at Ramien. He did not wipe the spittle off his dark shoulder but
stared intently at the polygon he’d made. Becky’s eyes were such narrow
slits that no white was visible. She poured something (scotch whiskey, it
was later determined) out of a brown glass bottle onto the heap and dropped
a match on it. The trip journal was produced, and the two explorers read
passages seemingly at random to the rest of us, and to a few “randoms” who
wandered by. Every time one passed the journal to the other they would
cooperate in ripping a page out and letting it drift onto the little flames
by their feet. They read loudly. “MONDAY: DOSED AT 9AM AND WENT TO
BREAKFAST. HAIRY LUNCH-WITCH (EVEN THOUGH BREAKFAST-TIME) TOLD RAMIEN HE
COULDN’T EAT WITHOUT ID CARD. EVERY SINGLE RANDOM THERE TALKING ABOUT
TRENT LOTT FOR SOME REASON. BECKY SWEARS HERE AND NOW SHE WILL NEVER RUN
FOR OFFICE.” Another entry from later in the month was less coherent.
“PATCHWORK TRUCE DECLARED ON TAMMY’S COUCH. MAYBE ELBOWS SIGHTING
(ACTUALLY TWO). CRITICAL INFO: NEG, NEG.” The ceremony continued for over
an hour, but only a few of us watched the whole thing. When it was over
the journal was empty. Becky and Ramien stood with necks bent in S-curves
looking at the sun. They turned inside. I turned on “Simpsons.” Ramien
packed a bowl.
There were casualties. Gregory moved out of the Apartment halfway
through the year, shouting wildly that his grandfather had died for our
sins. Jason lasted a few months into sophomore year, but went into
seclusion, emerging to disrupt parties with barely coherent demands that
the music be changed to Philip Glass, or to play intricate but cruel games of flattery and insult with his girlfriend. Kristin’s
native psychic abilities were keyed up to such a pitch of sensitivity she
went into convulsions when she saw in a dream that Brian, studying abroad,
had been arrested for boisterous drinking in Paris. Members of the
Apartment crowd were sent to jail for drug offenses, placed on disciplinary
leave, spoken of in serious tones by the administration behind closed doors.
But it was also a time of awe, of a great and supernatural beauty
we had scarcely known existed. Lovers learned to speak to one another
without making sounds. We all learned how to hold each other’s hands and face down acid-summoned monsters decorated with kaleidoscopic glamour.
And there were kindnesses, too. We all trembled before the holy power of our own words and ideas, and gradually the power of our kindnesses. Minutes before dawn in early winter I awoke in someone’s living room from the darkness of an alcoholic sleep. Opposite me a girl named Ruth turned in her sleep, pulling her arms into her chest for warmth. Ruth had sex with everyone I knew but me and Gregory by the end of the year, and at this particular time she hadn’t spoken to anyone in over a week. Stephen and Leo were playing chess in silence and watching the last fragments of color drain away from their hallucinations. Stephen moved his rook to Nick’s last file and leaned over Ruth, placing a blanket from the back of his chair on her pale body.
I first noticed my symptoms two years ago. It was January and I was
running a slight temperature. I’d backed out of a visit to my in-laws in
order to attend the American Historical Association conference in New York
City. Hundreds of academics crowded the lobby of the mid-town Hyatt.
Earlier that week, I’d learned that I’d been bumped from one of the
classes assigned to me for the next semester in favor of a full-time
professor. As the day progressed, I grew more and more fever-addled.
Around me milled groups of graduate students in a miasma of anxiety and
halitosis, while the professors schmoozed happily, already anticipating
next year’s shindig in Seattle. By Day 2, as I slouched in my seat
listening to a talk on war memorials, I found myself daydreaming about
blowing up the hotel.
Help! I thought. What’s going on here? My analyst had no advice.
She’d never heard of such a thing, doubted it was in the literature. I
felt ashamed and tried to keep my sick fantasy to myself, unnerved by the
image of mayhem lurking within my fevered brain.
But the urge to confess was too great. My friend Jonathan Skolnik came
to my rescue. “It’s called ‘going adjunct,’” he told me: homicidal
impulses directed at the academic profession. He cited an incident in New
York’s public school system, in which a beleaguered substitute teacher
became unglued and started hurling chairs at the wall. Perfectly normal,
he assured me. I felt instantly better.
But my symptoms didn’t go away. As I studied the job listings in the
Chronicle of Higher Education I found myself contemplating scenes of
bloodcurdling violence, followed by cheerful scenes in which fellow
adjuncts fed me cupcakes and made toasts in my honor. Hundreds of
tenured faculty gone! Yikes! I needed help and fast.
I talked to some of my fellow adjuncts, hoping they could tell me
something, anything, to reassure me. But they only seemed to agree that it
was just a matter of time before adjuncts replaced postal workers as
symbols of downtrodden, disgruntled laborers.
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The life of an adjunct is dismal indeed, as anyone who’s experienced
it can tell you. The worst part, according to Columbia grad student
Patrick Young, is the rude discovery that one is in a dead-end rather than
an entry-level job. Over the past two years Young has held down jobs at five
different institutions while working toward his Ph.D. in history. His
toughest days have included shuttling between three different campuses
spread over two of New York City’s boroughs. Young says he’s reached the
point where he feels more like a menial laborer than someone following a
linear professional path.
“The whole idea that you’d be that transient is so antithetical to the
idea of the engaged teacher,” says Young. Between bad pay and lack of
benefits and office space, Young is reminded on a daily basis of his
status as second-class citizen. Some of the most destructive aspects of
this existence are less easy to define. Confronted with the apathy of
academic departments, he says, most adjuncts have little choice but to
internalize their resentments endlessly. “The level of cynicism is
harrowing,” says Young. I ask what he means. He explains, “There’s a
constant temptation to avoid working hard because you’re simply
participating in your own exploitation.”
Hunter College adjunct lecturer Barbara Desmond has toiled for five
years in Hunter’s English department, where she describes working
conditions so crowded that one colleague sometimes uses the bathroom to
prepare for classes. Other disincentives include not being paid for
preparation time or to hold office hours; with classes of up to 35
students, this can add up. Desmond discounts the possibility that being an
adjunct has affected her performance; though conditions outside the
classroom are bleak, she claims that, in the end, her cynicism has been
short-circuited by her classroom experiences. Yet she tells me that in
her spare time she’s writing a script called “The Adjunct,” a horror movie
about an unstable part-timer who one day decides she’s had enough and
“goes adjunct.” “Kathy Bates would be perfect for the part,” says Desmond
a bit wistfully.
Tim Coogan is another denizen of this brave new world of academic
nomadism. He works as an adjunct lecturer at three schools in the New York
metropolitan area: Rutgers University, LaGuardia Community College and
Cooper Union. Last year he taught a total of 18 classes, ranging from U.S.
history and Western civilization to the history of technology and labor history.
In the past he’s also taught introduction to sociology, the history of
minorities and the history of New York City. He’s been doing this for 15
years and claims that he’s taught at every school in the greater New York area,
with the exception of Columbia and the New School.
Hired as much for their willingness to work for low wages and no
benefits as for their expertise in English composition or American
history, adjunct teachers have become an integral part of the new
market-driven university system. According to the National Adjunct
Faculty Guild, there are currently 400,000 adjunct, part-time and
full-time temporary college educators in the United States. Approximately
40 percent of the country’s total academic work force, in other words, is treated
as temporary labor — roughly double the 1970 figure. The reasons
for this expansion are complex — according to a report recently released
by the Modern Language Association, they have something to do with the end
of the nation’s Cold War-era educational funding system.
It’s no secret that schools balance their books with part-time
teachers. Downsizing and flexibility have become the mantras of academic
administrators. In the past, an implicit trade-off was assumed: In return
for providing cheap labor, graduate students and recent Ph.D.s could get
classroom experience that prepared them for life as members of the
professoriate. With the current crisis of oversupply, however, more and
more find themselves joining a new academic proletariat.
For the current crop of Ph.D.s, the glad tidings of generational change
have turned sour. The anticipated faculty turnover of the 1990s has
failed to materialize. Tenured professors tenaciously defend their closed,
guildlike world from the challenges of administrators and public
officials. Academic superstars, who nowadays easily command six-figure
salaries, often refuse to teach introductory level courses, which creates
an increasing demand for part-timers.
With declining budgets and escalating costs, overproduction of Ph.D.s
and an embattled professoriate clinging to its privileges, no one is
predicting changes any time soon. As NAFG executive director Patricia Lesko
puts it, “What would prompt college administrations to change their basic
employment practices?”
The problems are too “structural,” says part-time faculty advocate
Karen Thompson. When she’s not teaching English classes, Thompson
works as president of Rutgers University’s part-time chapter of the
American Association of University Professors. She stresses that academic
labor should be seen within the larger context of economic restructuring in which
new forms of contingent work are becoming the norm.
“Higher education is increasingly being transformed into a kind of
vocational training system,” she says. In the new information economy,
educators will continue to play an important role, maintains Thompson, but
an increasing number will do so as migrant workers. The ramifications are
already being felt at every level of the
higher education system: by an increasingly demoralized part-time
work force; by full-timers, whose own bargaining position is undercut by
the existence of this large reserve force; and by students, who are
inevitably shortchanged by the system.
I did manage to find a small glimmer of hope amid the ruinous
statistics. Over the past five years, I learned, NAFG and other
organizations like it have made “academic labor” one of the hottest topics
on campus. Efforts at organizing have injected a new militancy into the
hushed groves of academia. Though small, the tangible gains of these
developments are not entirely negligible. Thompson cites the granting of
recent concessions at CUNY, including better pay and pro-rated health
benefits.
But who can launch a movement, when you’re teaching four, five,
sometimes even more classes, often at more than one school, while trying
to finish a dissertation? Organizing also assumes a degree of
identification with one’s status that many are not ready to make. “Having
gone into adjunct teaching thinking it was a transitional phase,” Desmond
says, “I didn’t want to accept this as what I’m doing with my life, and
don’t want to have to defend it.”
Each conversation was confirming my worst fears about my future. By the
time I met Tim Coogan for coffee, I was thinking about a new career. He
seemed to read my mind. “It’s easy,” he nodded, “to get frustrated by the
sense that the profession has not made good on its promises. I know my
Marxism and my labor history, and I know I’m being super-exploited.”
Yet Coogan himself does not fit easily into the
adjunct-as-object-of-pathos mold.
Wiry, bearded and bespectacled, he exudes fearlessness. His is a
situation most would find singularly unappealing. Yet he’s managed to
carve out an enviable existence at the margins of academia. He ticks off
some basic facts: at around $3,000 a class (for up to 18 classes a year) he
makes as much as an associate professor. At Rutgers, where he’s
taught for more than 10 years, he has an office and is on the pension plan. He
also gets medical benefits from LaGuardia. And he gets to live in New York
City, a major plus.
“In the hierarchy of adjunctification,” Coogan says with a certain
sang-froid, “I’m at the top.” He publishes occasionally, thus escaping
the condescension that many adjuncts say they feel from full-time
professors.
Doesn’t he
ever find his situation depressing? Coogan admits that his career
trajectory has taken him down some strange byways. For instance, he’s
taught murderers and rapists at Riker’s Island, where New York’s Department of
Corrections maintains an educational outreach program. But Coogan says that he ultimately found the experience tremendously
rewarding. His inmate-students sent him a Christmas card at the end of
the semester.
Coogan seeks such challenges out. Not only do they pay well, but he’s
generally given carte blanche. He’s the hired gun,
the one who’s brought in to take the job when no one else would dare.
Indeed, Coogan finds hidden benefits to his situation. “In some ways,” he
points out, “I’m liberated from the tedium of academic life.” He
gets his pick of classes, and best of all, he never has to
attend departmental meetings, the bane of every professor’s existence.
He’s seen lots of his friends move on, and concedes that his life is
not for the fainthearted. Yet he himself still has energy to spare, a
fact he attributes to the pleasures of the classroom. Despite the
obvious drawbacks, Coogan says, “I can live with being an adjunct.” As he
rushed off to catch the subway to yet another class, I had to admit that
anything, even the subway, sounded better than a departmental meeting.
I wasn’t a violent person; I wouldn’t harm a fly, much less a professor.
Anyway, I mused, they already had plenty to worry about. I’d seen the future, and it
wasn’t pretty, but neither
was it completely discouraging. One day, when tenure is finally
demolished, academic cowboys like Coogan — smart, resourceful and
independent — will be the ones who thrive. Only the truly brave
will apply to graduate school in the first place, and they’ll wear the badge of
adjuncthood with pride.
When I graduated from college, I thought my ability to operate a Macintosh computer, speak Spanish and make a mean double latte were the skills I would ride to financial freedom. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my most marketable skill was that embarrassing little habit I’d shunted aside because it seemed so impractical: fiction writing. Not that I was being recruited to apply for positions like “budding novelist” or “sulking poet.” Far from it. But when I set out to get a job, that was the very first skill I fell back on. I plunged into my shallow life experience and offered my employers an ever-changing vision of what they wanted: in bulleted poetry. Over the years, I became known for my résumés, because I’d get jobs I wasn’t even qualified for. Soon I was helping friends compose their life stories and teaching the perverse art of self-promotion, otherwise known as career counseling.
You may not have ever harbored the urge to write the great American novel, but you still should know that a little imaginative zeal goes a long way in creating that artifact of personal history. Whether you’re applying to sling cappuccinos at the local cafe, tutor stuporous teens in the dark art of the SATs or spearhead a high-tech Web site, your fictional talents can help pave the way to a quicker, more painless paycheck.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you lie. Or even stretch the truth to distortion. Fibbing and fabrication are for fools, as an increasing number of Boston Globe columnists will tell you. I am suggesting that, like any writer, you harness your creative powers to tell the most compelling story you can muster. A résumé, to be frank, is a pathetic little narrative form, but you’ve got to grab your readers and hold them as long as it takes to wedge your foot in the door.
After years of obsessive résumé writing and editing on behalf of hundreds of career counseling clients, I realized that aside from the basic no-no’s (bad grammar, typographical inconsistencies and wooden-sounding objectives), the single most common problem in most résumés is that of omission. Young people are especially inclined to leave out the juicy details, the volunteer jobs, the one-person businesses, artistic creations and diverse hobbies that round out a résumé from a boring list into an irresistible three-dimensional human being.
Here are some fiction writing rules you can apply to the reviled art of résumé writing.
1. Understand your form
Most résumés follow a pretty standard order, which you can choose to change if you want to emphasize one of your strengths.
- Name, address and phone number/e-mail at the top of the page and in a larger and/or bolder font.
- Objective: A standard sentence fragment stating your career objectives. If it’s not for a corporate job, however, I recommend you eliminate this altogether.
- Education: Beginning with the present, work back in time, stating your post-high school degrees and experiences. List your college, major or area of expertise, and any graduating honors. Some people list their grade-point average. But in this day of grade inflation, it’s pretty damn meaningless and makes you seem like someone too eager to accept a numerical estimation of your worth. I’d skip it.
- Experience: Begin with the present and move back in time listing all the jobs, volunteer positions and other relevant experiences that bear upon the job you’re looking for. If you have a lot of job-related experience and are not as proud of your school performance, you may want to put your educational information after your experience. Note: This will be the section that you’ll probably change to tailor your résumé to each job you apply for. (This isn’t cheating, it’s completely standard practice!)
- You may also want to add a section called Honors, Prizes and Scholarships or Publications. This gives you a chance to fit in other goodies that won’t fit into Education or Experience.
- Finally, Interests or Activities can allow you to give them some sense of your personality beyond the glow of the office. And under Skills you can be specific about your technical skills, fluency with languages, etc.
2. Write what you know
Make a list of relevant memories and see if any of them can be fashioned into a “volunteer job.” Consistently, young college grads underestimate the importance of their “nonprofessional” experience, when they’ve had their most interesting and challenging experiences outside ordinary jobs, or even accredited classrooms. Think hard about situations when you’ve worked to create or organize something among friends, neighbors or family. It doesn’t need to be a formal volunteer job or internship to show off your skills. Plumb the depths of your memories and bring every relevant piece of information to the fore, then sort them out and fit them into one of your main categories. For instance, when I was 15, I teamed up with two other friends and began catering the parties of family friends. Later, when I applied for restaurant work, I could say I had founded and launched my own catering company.
3. Show, don’t tell
Don’t simply list your jobs. Try to describe the tasks and make each description as precise and elegant as you can manage. At the very least, choose your words with care. Do everything you can, short of being wacky, to catch and carry the eye of your reader. Avoid repeating words unnecessarily. Instead of saying “managed volunteers, managed office and managed inventory,” make sure each of your verbs is different and precise, as in “oversaw volunteers, coordinated office and managed inventory.”
3. Get feedback
Just because one person reads and understands your résumé won’t guarantee that it makes sense to everyone. The more people you can get to comment on and mark up your résumé, the closer you’ll be to communicating exactly what you intend.
4. Writing is rewriting
To misquote Sylvia Plath: Résumé writing is an art/like anything else./I do it so it feels real,/I do it so it feels like hell,/I guess you’d say I’ve a call.
Writing a résumé — especially your first one — can be a painful and frustrating process if you think you can whip one off in an hour or so. A good résumé is the compression of a lot of information and it will take some time to fit together. More time than you’ll probably predict. If you go into it with a sense that this is a process, then the process can be more fun than infuriating. Keep revising it and allowing it to change over the course of several drafts.
5. Get to the good stuff
Always put what’s most interesting and exciting up front, so job searchers can see it when they give your life a once-over. They don’t have time to go searching to discover what a gem you are; you must dazzle them from the start.
6. You are not your work!
That’s how one creative writing teacher used to put it. In the same sense, you are not your résumé. If you are having trouble making your résumé into a document that gets you an interview for a job you are amply qualified for, it doesn’t mean you’re a lousy person or even an unqualified worker. It’s simply a reflection on your résumé, a flimsy piece of paper that can change with every experience you have.
It all started with the penis thing. I was sitting in anatomy class, vaguely watching the professor scrawl body parts on the board, when suddenly I heard him say: “The penis can be retracted to reveal a scar, the presence of which indicates the closing of an undifferentiated vagina.” By the next morning, he continued, those of the male persuasion were supposed to go home, find a mirror and locate the aforementioned scar. The rest of us — those with differentiated vaginas — were supposed to find the scar on “a volunteer.” Then, with colored pencils, we were to trace exactly what we observed, and turn it in for a lab grade. Thirty points.
Now I’m not bragging or anything, but in my undergrad days, when push came to shove, I always managed to find “volunteers” to do things like hand out flyers for some wacko student production, auction themselves off for an excruciating date or read to bratty first-graders at the local school. Piece of cake. But was I really expected to recruit some guy so that I could lift up his penis and look for his vestigial vagina?
After class, I approached the board for clarification. “Excuse me, um, Dr.
T?” I asked. “What you want the women to do is to find a picture of the scar
in a medical text and draw that, right?”
Dr. T stared at me for what seemed like an eternity, then, finally, he spoke. “People,” he bellowed in a deep voice that always reached the very last row of the lecture hall, “are not textbook drawings. Tell me, Miss Gottlieb, what will you do as a doctor when a person, and not a textbook, walks into your
office?” I tried explaining that the person walking into my office would be
given a blue-and-white gown when told to disrobe, but my friends might react
differently to shedding their boxers and having their genitals traced with
colored pencils. That didn’t go over too well, though. Dr. T. sighed loudly,
as though mustering the patience to explain a simple concept to a mentally
impaired child. “Then please enlighten your so-called friends, Miss Gottlieb,
that they will be helping out in the name of science,” he replied before
turning his back and erasing the left anterior testis off the board.
On the way out the door, I ran through my inventory of guy friends and ex-boyfriends who might “volunteer.” I was pretty sure my guy friends would be
too embarrassed to do it (“Really, I swear, it’s usually bigger than this”),
and as for my ex-boyfriends, well, let’s just say it’s been a while, and I
didn’t trust myself around a potentially enlarged penis. By the time I got to
my car, I decided that I could do the assignment from a textbook picture and
no one would be the wiser.
I drove straight to the library, where, while waiting for my text to be pulled from the stacks, I took out a notebook containing my medical school
applications. “Please describe your greatest flaw,” said one school’s form.
Earlier I had started writing about my butt — how it used to be perky and
tight and then once I hit 30 I’ve noticed it sinking a bit — but then I
thought, wait: This is a med school application, not a Cosmo quiz. So I
searched my mind for an egregious character flaw, but I couldn’t think of
anything worse than the fact that sometimes, if I need an excuse to get off
the phone, I fake call-waiting and say I have to go. I didn’t consider using
a textbook drawing instead of a live person to be a flaw, per se. It was more
of a means to an end. Thirty points were a lot in this class.
Still waiting for my book, I moved on to the next essay: “Please discuss what you believe the role of the Honor Code in a medical school education should be.” In response to this question, I wrote a long piece about how people who violate the honor code aren’t fit to be doctors, because by cheating they are essentially saying: I don’t need to play by the rules. I’m exempt from society’s regulations. I even cited Ted Kaczynski as a case of narcissism gone awry, just to be topical. I concluded with: “If the academic setting can be viewed as a microcosm of the world at large, what will happen if people disregard the rules for their own self-interest when the stakes are higher than, say, attaining a certain GPA?”
Then it occurred to me: I am cheating, in a small way, in a way that most
students cheat, in the same way that many of us take restaurant deductions on
our tax returns for meals that weren’t strictly business. I am cheating and
rationalizing my behavior with comforting bromides like “Everyone does it”
or “It’s the system that encourages it” or “It was a stupid assignment
anyway.” Suddenly, I was deeply ashamed that, having been out in the
real world and returned to school as an adult, I was still at a place where my
own reputation — embodied in a single letter on a transcript — was more
important than the power of my own convictions.
I remembered a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine, a cardiac
surgeon. He told me that when he took the MCAT 10 years ago, he freaked out
because he realized that everything he’d worked for, his very future, would be
determined by the 10 passages staring up at him from the test booklet. “I
just panicked,” he said. “Suddenly my whole life came down to those 10
passages.” I asked him how he manages to stay calm when instead of 10 test
passages, a person’s exposed chest cavity stares up at him each day. “Well,
that’s completely different,” he replied matter-of-factly. “The MCAT was life
or death for me, but during surgery, I’m not the one on the table.”
Sitting in the library, I decided I never want to lose perspective like that.
But if I started now, with little things like claiming a drawing is actually a volunteer, I may eventually become so accustomed to doing whatever it takes to get ahead that I won’t be able to stop. When my textbook arrived, I found a clear, detailed photograph of the scar for the assignment. I knew I could get away with using this as a real penis — I could take my indigo pencil and shade in some pink and flesh tones, add a bunch of wrinkles, maybe circumcise it or draw in a mole if I were feeling creative — and say that my friend Bruce’s penis looked like this. I mean, how could anyone besides his girlfriend prove otherwise? But somehow it didn’t feel right. Instead, I took a bright red pencil, the color of blood, and printed in large block letters the name of the text from which I began tracing the tiny penile scar.
I won’t get the 30 points, that’s for sure. In fact, I may get a big fat zero. But at least now, I hope, I’ll have a slightly better shot at caring
about the guy on the table one day. Especially if I happen to be operating on his
penis.
Americans don’t agree on much. We fight about social spending, health care, sex, the military, parenting, religion, sex, the size of the federal
government, taxes, sex, but there is one thing we seem to agree on: Education
is a good thing, and more education is a better thing. We all know we’re in a time of political paralysis, when the most active thing official
Washington does is shut down the government. Yet in the past two years, below
the radar screen of scandal, the president and Congress have crafted
legislation to support higher education to the tune of more than $40 billion a
year. President Clinton spoke of making two years of college just as universal as
high school is now. Earlier this year, Clinton, in his State of the Union
address, announced that higher education is an American birthright.
Apparently, most of us don’t dispute such ideas. The Department of Education says that enrollment in college will surpass an all-time high of just under 15 million students this academic year, and well over half of high school seniors now go to college. Each year, we spend more than $175 billion on colleges and universities. States allocate vast amounts of tax revenue, the federal government subsidizes research and individuals go tens of thousands of dollars into debt to send either themselves or their children to college.
Conventional wisdom on the issue is clear and unequivocal: College is a
necessary prerequisite for skilled jobs. That piece of paper embossed with the words “graduated from” is universally believed to be a ticket to a better life, a better job, a more affluent and rewarding future. Just think of all the Hollywood images of college: pensive, clean young people — usually white — watching as charming Professor X lectures them about deep philosophical questions that will give them the keys to the universe. After several years of these experiences, the graduate emerges ready to land that first job and take that first step on a professional ladder of success and citizenship.
Oh, come on. Today’s college student is more likely to be a woman in her
30s attending night school at one of those cinder-block community colleges
designed by the same people who build prisons. Halls of Ivy? Not for 95
percent of the American college students today.
Higher education has been romanticized past the point of reasonable
discussion. We spend all this money, expend all this energy, go into
debt and exhaust an ever-rising portion of national resources. Yet few of us
ask what college is supposed to provide that leads to better jobs and a better
life. What are we supposed to learn in college? Politicians and educators
extol the power of college to create a competitive, highly skilled work force
that can hold its own in the international economy. But how does college bring
that about? How does sitting in a lecture on Plato make our superconductors
more competitive? How do gendered interpretations of Shakespeare make the
American college graduate a good citizen? How does Accounting 101 teach you to deal with real people in a real job? In what way does learning calculus
make you thrive in your job as a Blockbuster store manager, which,
incidentally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines as a college level job?
How did we get to this point? How is it that anyone who wants a halfway
decent job now has no choice but to go to college, whether or not he did well in high school, whether or not it has been 10 years since she last entered a
classroom? What if you’re a single mother with two children already working a
full-time job who has no money for health care or child care but has to go $5,000 into debt to get a two-year associate degree at the local
community college in order to get that $3,000 pay raise? What if you’re an 18-year-old guy who wants to set up a trucking business but who can’t get a loan from the bank because without the degree you’re seen as a high credit risk? Should you be compelled to go to college? Will anything you learn at college truly prepare you for the life of an insurance claims adjuster, or a bank teller, or a paralegal, or even an editorial assistant at a hip Internet magazine that emphasizes creativity and initiative but has little use for formal credentials?
These questions rarely get asked, and when they do, the stock response is to attack the questioner rather than to answer the question. Wondering if
universal higher education is really such a good thing is likely to get the
wonderer charged with reckless elitism and carrying a concealed conservative weapon. If advanced degrees are now required for any job of substance, then suggesting that advanced degrees are not for everyone is tantamount to consigning the un-colleged to lives as second-class citizens forever stuck in the ranks of the working poor. If degrees are totems that signify the bearer as competent, intelligent and job worthy, then questioning whether everyone needs degrees is equivalent to asking if everyone needs 2,000 calories a day.
Fair enough, but aren’t we forgetting something? Who ever said that college degrees signify competence? Who said that universal higher education makes for a better-prepared work force? Shouldn’t we be taking a hard look at those assumptions?
We could say that a college degree signifies that the student has thought
deep thoughts and learned critical analysis by reading the Great Books. But
less than 20 percent of today’s students take liberal arts courses, and even fewer
major in a liberal arts discipline. We could say that college should be a timeout, a time of growth, a time for self-knowledge, but only a privileged few
can afford that timeout, unless public funding for higher education
approached, oh, $1 trillion a year. The fact is that we get pretty
fuzzy when we think about college. We like the idea that college is about
liberal arts, and we like to believe that college also serves some utilitarian
purpose preparing students for jobs. But no one can say with any certainty
that reading Plato does anything to improve the competitiveness of the
American work force, and what’s more, most people in college don’t read Plato
or any other Great Book.
The fact is that the liberal arts ideal is not what lies behind the massive
growth of higher education in the past 20 years, and it is not why most of
those 15 million students will go to college, or why their parents will go
into debt, or why state legislators will reluctantly allocate even more money to the cause of college-educated masses.
Universal higher education is a response to the failings (real or imagined)
of high school. Students routinely graduate high school barely able to write,
barely able to read and not at all able to think critically. The situation is
especially dire in urban public schools. Colleges now spend an inordinate
amount of time on remedial education, on the teaching of basic skills that
students in the rest of the developed world learn in high school. To a large
extent, we’ve simply extended the period of basic education into college
because our primary and secondary schools are not doing what they ought to be.
Universal higher education also stems from a long-held immigrant belief that education is a vehicle of social advancement. In inextricably linking jobs, mobility, individual success and economic competitiveness to college, we’ve bought the dubious notion that a college education is necessary for any skilled job. But it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Faced with a choice between two applicants, one with a college degree and one without, almost any
employer will chose the one with a college degree, even if the degree doesn’t
relate at all to the job at hand. College graduates are presumed to be better
qualified, whether they have learned anything in college classrooms that make
them better qualified.
For instance, a 29-year-old divorced mother who barely finished high school and who lives in a marginal urban neighborhood may have a hard-earned savvy about families, children and the streets. That may make her a superb youth counselor. But faced with a choice between her and a 21-year-old college graduate with a degree in sociology, many state agencies will hire the college graduate over the divorced mother. The college graduate may come from a more affluent background, and she may have never set foot in a ghetto until that point, but heck, she’s read Durkheim and done intensive case studies, and she even interned at the local hospital for six weeks during her junior year, and more to the point, she has a college degree.
To be fair, the college graduate may end up doing a brilliant job, but there’s nothing about her background that suggests that she will do even a competent job, and she clearly lacks those intangible skills that the divorced, degree-less mother has. The classroom can teach many things, but it ain’t the real world. Skill-oriented classes like accounting and management don’t necessarily teach someone how to deal with life in all its messiness any more than reading Hegel does. We used to draw a distinction between actual experience and book knowledge, and we used to laugh at people who thought that book knowledge was a substitute for learning by doing. OK, some of that could be chalked up to American anti-intellectualism, but there’s such a thing as too much intellectualism, and privileging book and classroom knowledge to the extent we now do often violates common sense.
Even more disturbing is that universal higher education is clothed in the
rhetoric of democracy. Universal higher education is said to open doors, but
in reality, it narrows our options and leaves us with less freedom to chart
our lives and careers. That’s because universal higher education is
actually mandatory higher education. Democracy is about choice, but the trend
toward universal higher education has become perversely coercive. It’s one
thing to insist that children have a certain amount of education, but to
require adults to attend college or face dire economic consequences flies in
the face of individual choice. What if someone just doesn’t want to attend
college? What if they believe that their skills and education are better
served by volunteering for the National Park Service and learning about
wildlife by living in the wild? Why should they have to go and study the
microbiology of plants in a classroom setting when they’ll probably decide to
learn such things as their lives and careers advance?
But for now, people don’t have that choice, or at least exercising that
choice comes with, as some government commission might say, high social
negatives. It’s now presumed that someone without a college degree is stupid,
because it’s now so easy to go to college that only the dim, dense and
unmotivated are thought to steer clear of it. And so, millions of people end
up going to college not because they want to, not because they’re interested
in liberal arts (and by the way, given the jargon-filled academic culture
today, a love of literature is not always well-served by taking an English
course) and not because they have either the time, money or inclination, but simply because they must. It’s as if we’ve decided to charge every American a tax of tens of thousands of dollars and years of time in order to join the club of the gainfully employed.
It goes without question that higher education can be a wonderful experience; it even occasionally matches the romantic notions we have of it. But for most of the 15 million students at the 3,500 institutions of higher learning, college is an anarchic place. The requirements for a degree are confusing, and no one takes the time to explain why you need to take the courses you have to take. A surprisingly high percentage of students emerge from the classroom convinced that the whole thing is a waste of time and money that could have been better spent.
We seem to have forgotten that classroom learning is only one form of
knowledge, and for millions of us, not knowledge that is particularly desirable, much less necessary. As it stands, we’re on the verge of consigning ourselves to mandatory higher education. Before we reach the point of no return, we should remember that universal higher education is a development that began after World War II, and is only now becoming a reality. The vast majority of our parents and grandparents, many of whom we admire for their wisdom, intelligence and business acumen, didn’t go to college. Now, given the current ethos, either they were stupid … or we are.
