Tuesday, March 4, 2008
The Job Hunt
Posted by Chris in carnivals, chris sartinsky, internships, jobs, vomit
Here is the only way I can envision myself getting a job at this point: I get another unpaid internship, plug away at that for a few months, let my supervisors see that I am good at and genuinely untroubled by the tedious, thankless tasks they give me and impress them enough that they make up some job for me on the lowest rung of the ladder for a tiny salary and I stay there for much longer than I should because it’s easier to just stay than go through the process of looking for a new job. But the problem with that is, how am I ever going to find that internship?
I’m not sure how I’ve ever gotten any jobs, to be honest. It must have been magic — and I’m not using that word as a sentimental way of describing the way circumstances come together perfectly; I mean it must have been actual literal magic. Like spells and cauldrons and shit. My resume is uninspiring (and unaccented), my cover letter banal, my interview dismal. The cover letter is the worst part, I think, because I am (ostensibly) a writer of some kind, and yet here’s my cover letter, and it’s about as boring a document as you’ll ever see. You’re supposed to talk about all your accomplishments, I guess, but the only accomplishment that sticks with you after going through my cover letter is how I accomplished to string together so many identical declarative sentences one after another. I did this. I did that. I learned this. I worked there. And I don’t know how to improve it, because talking about your successes is kind of hard when you think you’re a dumb kid with a lot to learn and not much success to his name just yet. (Which is not to say that I’m worse off than any of my peers. I think we’re all dumb kids with a lot to learn and not much success to our names, except for maybe a few exceptions. It’s just that many of my peers don’t seem to realize this the way I do, or at least they aren’t consumed by it.) I really am honestly a smart guy, I think, and a hard worker, but you can’t just come out and say that in a cover letter, because no one will believe you, and “I am smart” is probably just about the stupidest sentence in the history of language. My most valuable contributions to my employers are the kind of things you can’t really quantify or talk about without sounding like a complete bullshit artist. I do what I’m told quickly and without complaint. This is something, but go to an interview with just that and see how quickly it sounds like nothing.