employment and academia
Mar. 18th, 2004 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dchenesI think I might be getting slightly better today. I've still got a sore throat and all that stuff, but I don't feel so much like I've been hit by a train. I really wish I could have had yesterday off instead of Tuesday, but yesterday I had to turn in a midterm exam, so it would have been a bad day not to be in class.
In the Yet Another Thing To Put On My Resume department, I got an e-mail message this morning telling me that Phi Sigma Iota wants me as a member. Phi Sigma Iota is the national foreign language honor society. I wonder if joining it really means anything other than the fact that I get to wear a little extra regalia at graduation and I get to put the membership on my resume? Of course, I'm biased, because I was in the National Honor Society in high school, and the only thing it was good for at my high school was to look good on college applications. (I got the acceptance letter from Oberlin the same day I was inducted into the NHS. I never went to any meetings because I was on the swim team at the time, and I was more interested in going to practice than going to NHS meetings. Everybody who actually went to the meetings admitted they were a waste of time anyway. The NHS sent me a nasty letter at the end of the swimming season, telling me that if I didn't start going to meetings, they were going to throw me out. So I went to a couple of meetings, and got the NHS seal on my high school diploma, and that was that.)
It's funny, now that I think about it. People make a tremendous big deal about how your record in high school will make or break you getting into college, and then you get in and nobody cares. Your record in college will supposedly make or break you getting into grad school, except it doesn't. If it did, I wouldn't be here. And after you get out of school in general, nobody cares what sort of student you were, as long as you graduated. Nobody interviewing me for a job has ever asked me for my college GPA, or cared what my extracurricular activities were, or any of that stuff. There's no such thing as a "permanent record", and even if there was, I doubt anybody would care what was on it.
So what am I accumulating now? Two lines on the next version of my resume. One that says "Member, Phi Sigma Iota", and one that says "MA, French Translation, Kent State University, 2005". Will either of these get me a job as a translator? I don't know.
In the Yet Another Thing To Put On My Resume department, I got an e-mail message this morning telling me that Phi Sigma Iota wants me as a member. Phi Sigma Iota is the national foreign language honor society. I wonder if joining it really means anything other than the fact that I get to wear a little extra regalia at graduation and I get to put the membership on my resume? Of course, I'm biased, because I was in the National Honor Society in high school, and the only thing it was good for at my high school was to look good on college applications. (I got the acceptance letter from Oberlin the same day I was inducted into the NHS. I never went to any meetings because I was on the swim team at the time, and I was more interested in going to practice than going to NHS meetings. Everybody who actually went to the meetings admitted they were a waste of time anyway. The NHS sent me a nasty letter at the end of the swimming season, telling me that if I didn't start going to meetings, they were going to throw me out. So I went to a couple of meetings, and got the NHS seal on my high school diploma, and that was that.)
It's funny, now that I think about it. People make a tremendous big deal about how your record in high school will make or break you getting into college, and then you get in and nobody cares. Your record in college will supposedly make or break you getting into grad school, except it doesn't. If it did, I wouldn't be here. And after you get out of school in general, nobody cares what sort of student you were, as long as you graduated. Nobody interviewing me for a job has ever asked me for my college GPA, or cared what my extracurricular activities were, or any of that stuff. There's no such thing as a "permanent record", and even if there was, I doubt anybody would care what was on it.
So what am I accumulating now? Two lines on the next version of my resume. One that says "Member, Phi Sigma Iota", and one that says "MA, French Translation, Kent State University, 2005". Will either of these get me a job as a translator? I don't know.
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Date: 2004-03-18 09:44 am (UTC)