I'm pretty embarrassed when I go back to look at my first teaching applications. I had good ideas about how to write a cover letter or organize a resume, but I hadn't developed an ability to say things concisely.
Of course, since I still haven't even had a real interview, I can't say I'm anything near an expert, but I blame the content of my resume and lack of teaching experience for those things. I'm still open to revising my resume and cover letters (each one is personalized), but I have basic templates.
I needed to let myself stumble around failing for a while before I could develop the ability to create these documents successfully. As I mentioned, getting a job is another thing entirely, but now I can't blame it on clumsy formatting. :) Whether this is good or bad, I'm not sure . . .
All this to say: as an adult, I recommend that you be willing to fail at new things, so you can develop new competencies. We often resist trying new things because we're afraid (correctly) that we'll fail. Being that afraid of failure means we'll never get to experience success or competence, either. I hope I will eventually . . .
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I am immensely thankful that the grad program I'm in has a pretty aggressive placement committee at the moment; my adviser has held a couple of 'how to put your application together' sessions that covered all kinds of things I never would have thought of.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'm learning the value of tapping advising resources instead of trying to do everything myself (which I tend to default to, since I'm a perfectionist, first child, whatever).