I’m having a little trouble processing that this really is the end of my last fall semester. And I really have no excuse to continue putting off my resume tape and updating my paper resume and cover letter templates so I can at least pretend to be a functional adult.
I figure picking a unique color like burgundy will help me stand out from the sea of plain black or blue resumes. I even made the “slate” for the front of my resume tape (my contact information for editors who want to hire me) match the rest of my documents.
(not that I don’t trust the internet, but yeah, I don’t trust the internet.)
I made these adjustments to my tape after sending my first draft to one of the reporters that I worked with at an internship (who also happens to be a Hartford alum), since I trust him and he really knows what he’s talking about. I’m taking his advice on how to make my tape better.
And once I had all that settled, my next step was deciding where to submit my newly-created resume tape. I made a list of all the stations hiring, and then narrowed them down to places where I could actually do the job correctly, and narrowed from there to places where I would actually want to work. It still left me with 35 possible openings, but 35 is a lot better than 127…which is infinitely better than 859, so I’ll take it.
There’s still a lot of choices, but I feel like putting them into a spreadsheet at least makes me feel better about the process.
Meanwhile, I managed to find myself a freelance writing job for a site called “Stuff Journalists Like”. While it’s not exactly what I had pictured myself doing – making Buzzfeed-style GIF lists – it allows me a way to show people the things in my life and it gets me something national that I can put on my resume. Plus, these pieces are fun. I’ve been trained as a traditional journalist – hard news, investigations, and the like – and creating and sharing these humorous GIF articles is a great way to make people laugh, which is one of my favorite things to do. Plus, having a super-popular Twitter handle and Facebook page share out my piece with my name on it is probably one of the coolest things ever.
(shameless self-promotion: my first piece is here.)
The Job Hunt Diaries will be published monthly as Editor-In-Chief Rachel Cisto ’15 navigates the trials and tribulations of the post-grad job market.