Job hunting and positive character traits

Since I have dropped out of university, I am looking for work, or, to use a common expression, “hunting for a job”.

I find the expression humorous — for me, it conjures up the image of a certain bulbous cartoon huntsman on the trail of a wise-cracking, carrot-munching leporid. But I hope that the outcome is more favourable for me than is usually the case for our animated friend.

I’ve been reading about how to write résumés and cover letters, which I haven’t had to do in a long time. I have alluded previously to my difficulty in updating my résumé since beginning graduate school. My parents had coerced me into keeping many of my activities either secret or low-profile, when I should have been broadcasting them to the world. Thus, I have many more skills than is apparent from the list of things I’ve “officially” done, and I’m having a lot of trouble incorporating these into my résumé.

The obvious solution to this problem is to get a job where I can “officially” make use of my skills. I would love to have a job that requires me to make use of all of my skills at once, but I can’t imagine what that might look like.

One of the pieces of advice on writing résumés and cover letters that is repeated everywhere is to project positive traits, such as initiative, determination, creativity, ingenuity, love of challenge, and so on. I honestly don’t know how to do this without coming across as really fake — I suppose that this takes a certain kind of skill.

It’s not that I don’t have these traits or am unable to “project” them. For example, when I was in high school, I used to visit the university library regularly to study ahead. When my father ordered me to stop these visits, I snuck out at night from my window by using a contraption I had built using ropes, bungee cords, a weight-lifting set, pillows, belts, springs, pulleys, and chairs. (My inspiration for this was the Bat-Climb.) How’s that for initiative, determination, etc.?

Subsequently, I would always do very well on the “block and tackle”-type questions which would inevitably show up in mathematics and physics competitions. What I’ve never been able to figure out was what had motivated all the other kids to learn how to solve these types of problems, since that was never taught in class, and I can’t see how this ability would be useful to most teenagers.

In any case, what I’m supposed to do in my résumé and cover letter is to tell the kind of story that I had just told above — except that it has to be work-related.

– davinci 11740

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