Should You Leave Your PhD Off Your Resume?

As you know, I've recently turned over a new leaf. Under the direction of my job coach Jeff, I've been leaving my PhD and MA off all my job applications. (It's not a lie, guys! It's "selective editing!") Which means that in the eyes of my would-be employers, I have a B.A. - and that's it.

You'd think this would have re-opened the can marked "Worms of Insecurity" in my old psychic pantry, but to be honest it's been kind of fun. It's like having a fresh start, except without having to move to Louisiana and bond with my great-grandmother or whatever the hell Reese Witherspoon does in movies where she has to "start over". Instead, I just have to pretend it is 2001. And while I may not want to revisit the peasant blouse or start dating angry Simpsons-quoting assholes again, I DO think I'll start ironically listening to Christina Aguilera on a Discman and thinking that "awesome" is an 80s word to be used sparingly and not, like the only word in the world. SERIOUSLY GUYS. We need to start saying some DIFFERENT SHIT.

Buoyed up by my dance-pop soundtrack, it's all the easier to recapture the main feature of my 2001 existence: the idea that I could do pretty much anything my little BA-getting heart desired. Do you see the trick here? When you force yourself to ignore your limitations - which in the case of ex-academics is too much education - you immediately feel less boxed-in by them. If you start thinking like you're 22 again...you start thinking like you're 22 again. I was enthusiastic back then, and that enthusiasm is still contagious. An internship in public policy? Bring it on. A magazine job in New York? Why not?

I may or may not actually get a job this way, but I'm starting to think that leaving the degrees off the old resume is more about getting a different perspective, about opening options. So for the time being, I'm 22, my whole life is ahead of me, and I'm going to do great things when I grow up. I regret nothing. I have only hope, excitement, and a discman full of songs I listen to not in spite of, but because I think they're stupid. Whatever happens, it's been nice to return to those happier, low-rise times - and I don't regret it. How could I? It's 2001, regret is for losers, and I am not a loser because I wear Campers.

Total Eclipse of the Box

My job coach, Jeff, emailed me this morning. No subject heading, just one miserable line:

“But are you thinking outside the box?”

I wouldn’t make this up: it’s as stupid and depressing to write as it was to read. It’s not that’s it’s a cliché, it’s that saying it’s a cliché has itself become cliché. It’s like making fun of yuppies or complicated Starbucks orders. WHASSUP! Talk to the Hand. Who let the Dogs Out?

You see? The irony expiration date has passed - there is literally no way to react to people who speak like this without becoming, on some level, a person who speaks like that. It is a Godfather-II-type situation. The more you try to get out, the more it pulls you back in.

I am in a world that is in no way my own, I think, hitting "reply". I am in a foreign land, with people who do not speak my language. The trees are made of non-fat half-caff soy chai latte and the man in the moon is shaking it like a Polaroid picture. In this land, I just hang around and watch, excluded. Sadly, unfunnily, like a kitten from a tree.

What's MORE sad, of course, is that I actually have been thinking outside the box, as I detail for Jeff.

I mean, I'm hanging out at Starbucks with resumes casually on-hand and chatting up every Blackberry loser that sidles up to the toppings bar. What's that if not outside the box? If you knew how I felt about Starbucks and then saw me doing what I've been doing, you would conclude that I am thinking so far outside the box, I wouldn't even know what a box was anymore. Seriously, you could come up to me with a box and I'd be like "what is that reductive problem-solving paradigm? What do you call that in your formulaic stick-to-the-program culture?" If a box was here

I would be here

Etc.

Obviously Jeff didn't think so much about my box-destroying abilities though, because he called me up later in the day. "Maybe you need to think outside the education box," he said. "Maybe if you're applying for non-academic jobs, you need to show your employers that you can leave the box marked "ex-academic"". Translation: it wouldn't be a bad idea to start leaving out the irrelevant details of my work history, including my grad degrees.

What does life have in store for a 29-year-old with a BA in English, no work history to speak of, and a fierce ability to see the world in box-free terms?  Stay tuned!

Connections

I went to see a job counselor yesterday. It’s a free government service, which means that I had to stand in line with lots of new immigrants and a bunch of other white people who like smoking. It was a long wait. I watched women breastfeed under posters about AIDS. The guy sitting beside me wrote “neck pain” in capital letters at the top of his form, then underlined it twice. I read a pamphlet about diversity that was written in four different languages. Based on the pictures, I think I figured out the Farsi word for “blind person,” which made me feel pretty smart.

By now, I’ve stood in enough lines to know about the weird hostility that permeates government reception rooms. Everyone silently weighing their own deservedness, against the other strangers in the room. Surely I deserve a job more than the neck pain guy, right? I have a PhD. But surely, thinks NECK PAIN, I need a job more than her with her fancy education and perfectly functional neck. No one hates poor people more than other poor people. Hate doesn’t come from ignorance, it comes from desperation. You want an elitist? Take a white liberal with a Master’s degree in social theory and starve him for a week in a basement. Then ask him what he thinks about class consciousness. Ask him about who he thinks should get all the jobs, and why. Ask him about “them”.

Jeff, my job coach, is one of “them”. On one level, on the level of me being desperate and bitter, he’s a guy with a job who is not me or one of my beer-buying friends. But on a deeper level, he’s an eternal “them”, the kind of  “them” I and “us” have always – and mistakenly - counted ourselves superior to. He has a Party of Five haircut and a screensaver of him in doing something Xtreme on a lake and he says the word “proactive” twice within the first ten minutes. And now he’s telling me what’s wrong with me. Them. Who knew? They did. Jeff did.

Sitting side-by-side at his computer, Jeff reviews my resume, my cover letter, and my "job plan" (basically: who I'm targeting, when and how). It only takes a few minutes for Jeff to pinpoint the problem: I have no connections. I start to protest, but realize he's right: I know no one who fits on his list of "community organizer, church leader, business mentor, or sports captain". In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of people in my network with real jobs. How is it possible that out of everyone I know, all but two of them exist on grant money or are still supported by their parents? And of the other two, one is a telemarketer and the other a weed dealer?

I tell Jeff I wish things were different for me, too.

“Hey”, he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. The time on his rubbery scuba watch is 3:02:54. “It sounds like you have a case of the job-search blues.”

Do I have the blues? At home in my basement, I eat three Lean Pockets and add “windsurfing” under “interests” on my resume. I apply for a data entry job and read a rejection letter from the library, where I applied as a general assistant. Finally, I go to sleep and have a terrible dream about Jeff who is dressed like one of the Hostess Munchies and tricks me into having sex with him in a barn that turns into a Farsi School for the Blind. When I wake up, I have two more rejection emails and the beginnings of a racking cough.

Maybe I will start a website, I think.

So here it is. My job search blog. While I don't think it's quite what Jeff had in mind, I can't help but hope that it may open some doors for me. Maybe you'll like it and know of someone who will hire me, or maybe you just want to virtually swap backpack-to-briefcase stories from the privacy of your own mother's basement. Perhaps you are a robot who would like to tell me about Viagra or Hoodia extract in battered and hilarious English. In any and all cases, feel free to comment! Because aside from a job, money, and confidence, the only thing I need is new, job-having friends, even those whose names end with .com and whose fake persona culminate in class-action lawsuits. Enjoy!