We all remember what we were told in high school: Try to build up your resume. We played sports, joined clubs, earned a great GPA and dedicated our Saturday mornings to community service in obedience of this principle. That’s how we all were accepted into this university.
Of course, what we heard in high school is also one of the first things we heard in college: Try to build up your resume. Get involved, lead something, get those internships, do that research — it’s what graduate schools and prestigious employers want from their prodigies. It’s how we make the most of college.
At this point, you may have presumed this column to be a rebuke of resumes. You may have anticipated that I would claim resumes to be imperfect, incomplete depictions of identity and personality and thus useless. But if I did, I’d be a flagrant hypocrite — I’ve been working on my resume for the past couple days, actually. No, the existence of the resume is not the problem I wish to discuss; seeing life as one big resume workshop is.
A friend of mine was at a mixer for local start-ups and entrepreneurs recently, and in the course of mixing, he stumbled upon someone he hadn’t seen in a while. My friend described this person as being rather ambitious, a true entrepreneur, and as he was beginning to ask this person how his company had been performing, the entrepreneur stopped him. He said he needed to go get another beer, and he did so. A few minutes later, my friend saw him in the throes of another conversation.
My friend surprisingly was not hurt by this, as I would have been. He attributed the man’s abruptness to the fact that they were in radically different lines of work. It thus would be a waste of the entrepreneur’s time to talk to someone who could not prove to be of immediate, tangible value to his career or goals. He could be making better connections elsewhere. Why waste time? He has dreams to fulfill, success to be achieved.
I think that the entrepreneur’s attitude is consistent with the underlying attitude of “try to build up your resume.” This phrase is intended to motivate us to live active, engaged lives and not squander good opportunities. But this is not a fully ethical motivation — it is mostly a selfish one.
When we do things — join a club, say, or volunteer — with our resumes in mind, our relationship to those activities is parasitic. No matter how noble the thing is on the surface, doing things for the sake of resume-building is doing things for the sake of ourselves. We only care about those things insofar as they make us look better. It is a way of making the world into an awards ceremony, into a space where our personal happiness is paramount. This changes our activities from ways to do genuine good in the world to mere glamor products.
We know what this looks like. We all logged our volunteer hours in order to get Bright Futures; we all have applied to internships because they would make our resumes sing. I was rejected from one of those types of jobs last semester. My chief anguish was never being able to type that position at the top of my resume. This is a difficult problem to escape from.
The entrepreneur would not talk to my friend because he offered nothing of value, nothing that the entrepreneur wanted. This is the side effect of living one’s life in order to better oneself. If you encounter something that cannot further your quest for self-fulfillment, you move on. If you spot a better, more glamorous job than the one you have now, you go for it.
But not everything in life is meant to make us happy. Some things require the sacrifice of our happiness, like family or relationships, or being a good student. If we only deem opportunities, or even people, valuable because they move us closer to our dreams and goals, we do not actually see them as valuable, only useful. They are a means to a selfish end.
What do I propose as an alternative, then? We should rethink, or at least try to, the limits of a resume. It is a piece of paper intended to succinctly communicate you to an employer. It is not meant to be a way of life or a mode of being in the world.
So go after those good opportunities, but not just because you can type it on your resume afterward. Understand that some things have value, whether they help us achieve our dreams or not.
Scott Stinson is a UF English senior.His column appears on Mondays.
