Last Thursday, I attended GRF Seema’s mini-seminar on constructing a resume. As someone who had never really received any kind of instruction or guidance in crafting a resume (maybe explaining my bad luck with internship applications), I was glad to receive more formal, structured guidelines for my resume (and my CV – the two are very different, as we learned!).

Seema was incredibly clear and helpful, and I did walk away feeling better prepared to tackle any future applications; at the same time, however, I couldn’t help but feel a little dejected that so much of my future was hinged on a piece of paper (or multiple pieces of paper, in the case of a CV). Where’s the section on my human joys and sufferings? My trivial habits and quirks? My beliefs and opinions and morals? My Myers-Briggs personality type?

Obviously, these factors probably are only vaguely important when employers or schools are considering me for a position, so of course they aren’t sections on the standard resume – but why don’t employers or schools consider these factors? Can they really glean enough about me from a few pieces of paper and one or two brief interviews – in which I’m most definitely going to be faking it until I make it – to be certain that I’m a better or worse fit for their institution than other candidates?

Thanks to the seminar, my resume is at least 200x more put-together now than it was before the seminar – a good thing, since this piece of paper is the key to almost anything I would ever want to do in the future. But it’s still strange to realize that for countless people, their only perception of me as a human being – with my own set of minor and major life experiences – will be from a series of arbitrary achievements and power verbs.