I’ve spent most of today hashing out a resume for a potential job offer. From a list of achievements and relevant experience I made a while back, I constructed a one page textual representation of all the recognized cultural capital I’ve acquired over the years. Resumes have always been funny to me; why can’t you just give an interested employer a list of relevant experiences, activities, etc. and call it good? Why must there be such a science to creating a resume. I mean, I spent 30 minutes today talking to a campus employee whose sole job is to critique and give advice on constructing resumes and an hour or so more making sure my resume was juuuuust right. Do employers really care if your margins are off, if you write in complete sentences, or if you don’t use action verbs? Has anyone ever been given justification on why this is so? In addition to getting advice on my resume, I was also given an interview guide. I skimmed through it while walking home from campus figuring I might learn a thing or two. I was astonished by how precise the guide was with regard to behavior during an interview. It read as if it were some esoteric text revealing the all-powerful secrets of influencing employers in order to get the job you want. But aren’t the “secrets” known by everyone, thus rendering them no longer secrets? I read somewhere a while back, maybe in a Goffman text, that when you recognize and subsequently verbalize the structure of social interaction, it breaks down. What I took this to mean was that social interaction hides behind a degree of intuition and its best to keep it that way lest you botch the whole thing. It’s difficult, however, when you study anthropology as I do (or sociology) and your “job” is to analyze and pick apart these things; it can lead to some awkward social encounters! Eventually you learn (or at least I did) to keep your opinions inside in order to preserve the interaction. You turn yourself over to intuition and “feel” rather than “think” things out. Is this what we do in interviews and other strict social interactions? Do we all recognize the structure but choose to temporarily ignore it in order to preserve the interaction? I have an interview next Thursday… wish me luck on not over-analyzing the situation! 
Just some Thursday evening thoughts….
