Hi Everyone,
Here’s the second part of my reflections on looking for a job with your humanities degree. I wanted to share a few ways in which you could talk about your experiences in grad school meaningfully on your resume. I remember struggling a great deal when I had to describe my time in graduate school as work experience. However, believe me, you have done plenty of significant and interesting things while in grad school and have gained valuable experiences and skills! Think of this post as a quick brainstorming session where we think back to your time in grad school and try to capture it on paper.
Mention Your Education Last
Don’t flaunt your MA/PhD right off the bat. I know you worked hard to get that degree and it is one of the proudest accomplishments of your life. However, if you’re looking for work beyond the university, you will find that your degree does not mean much to the folks outside of your usual academic circle.
Although she might be impressed by the fact that you have a MA or a PhD, the hiring manager will not automatically get the sense for how hardworking you are and how much you had to accomplish in order to get that degree. It is your job to tell the hiring manager in detail what it means to have gone to graduate school and what kind of experiences you have gained as the result. Put your education last on your resume, but highlight your experiences in the summary at the top in a meaningful and pithy way.
Here are the points you could stress:
Number of Years of Experience
Depending on the length of your program, you could probably say you’ve spent at least 2 years in higher education if you have your MA and 4-7 years if you got your PhD. These numbers are impressive. Don’t think of your time in graduate school merely as a time you spent there as a student. Think of the time you spent there as work experience where you’ve worked for several years in a field as a researcher and educator. Tell the hiring manager just how long you’ve been doing this.
If you’re not looking for work in higher education, you could stress different aspects of your experience depending on the particular job you’re applying to. For instance, your experience working with students could be turned into a number of years in customer service. Students are customers and as an educator, you’re ultimately delivering a service to a paying customer. Moreover, if you have direct teaching experience, it would be considered an asset for roles in training, customer service, advising or consulting, etc.
Communication Skills
Describe the situations in which you’ve been an excellent communicator. Think how much public speaking you had to do while in grad school. Think of having to participate in discussions in your seminars. Think of all the graduate and professional conferences you have attended where you had to present your research in front of a diverse audience: undergraduate students, other graduate students, the general public, accomplished academics, etc.
Think back to teaching undergrads or leading tutorials; think of how you had to lead larger groups during the class hours and work with students one-on-one during the office hours. The size of the audience you had to address and the different approaches you had to take in your presentations can tell the hiring manager a lot about your communication skills.
Consider your writing skills as well. Of course, you did your own research and wrote about your findings. If you got to teach, you probably also had to create teaching materials for your classes: tutorial notes for yourself, and reading materials or exercises for the students. You probably wrote long emails to students going over the material covered in class or answering their questions. Thus, you are someone who knows how to interpret and explain complex information concisely and in a friendly manner.
You peer reviewed the work of other graduate students and graded undergraduate papers. You have an eye for grammatical errors and proper punctuation.
Have you sent out communications to members of the university community or to the general public about an event or academic conference your student group was organizing? Have you ever created a newsletter? Did you write proposals for scholarships and grants? Mention it!
Technical skills
It might seem like you have not gained any technical skills in grad school, especially if, as a humanities student, your workload consisted entirely of reading books and writing papers. I know you definitely know how to use Word because this was how you did most of your writing. But you probably are also skilled at PowerPoint, because you had to prepare a presentation or two one of your tutorials.
How about Excel? If you had to keep a class list and enter grades for your grading or teaching jobs, you probably know how to use a few formulas. You can study up your Excel and PowerPoint if needed for a particular job, but don’t neglect to put them down on your resume now.
Perhaps you even helped to run a website for a student group and know how to use blogging software. Mention those. If you used Blackboard or other software to communicate with your students or manage class lists while teaching, that too is a worthwhile skill to mention.
Event Organization
Lastly, have you helped out with any events during your time in grad school? Do you have any experience organizing conferences, helping your supervisor with a workshop, leading student colloquia? If you did, you will have a ton to talk about there. Consider how you had to work with different parties within the university: you asked the dean and your department for funding, relied on facilities team to book the space and catering, communicated with academics whom you invited to be a keynote or presenters, and had to organize volunteer support by other students. You also created and followed a budget, did presentations to ask for funding, helped to arrange accommodations for presenters, sent out communications, created visual materials and ads, etc.
Helpful Resources
I hope this brainstorming session helps you to start thinking about how you could describe your experience in grad school to a hiring manager in a language that makes sense to her. Stress some aspects of your experience more than others, depending on the job you’re applying to. For example, you should probably highlight your grant writing experience for a position in fundraising and your experience tutoring students one-on-one for a job in customer service. When you find yourself running out of words and synonyms to describe your accomplishments in a resume, check out this helpful article from The Muse.
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