Reflection on Project 3

Hi everybody!

Today we are going to talk about résumés and cover letters! It’s summer and you’re lucky if you already found your job for the next two months, I unfortunately haven’t. So in class we had to find a job ad and write our résumé and a cover letter for it. It was interesting because I usually just searched small jobs to make some money during the summer or the holidays, but here we had to look for a job in our major that we would apply for after we graduate. So I found that company, Ezoic, that has a position opened for customer service and sales in French in London. They are looking for people to help companies figure out how the software works, so we need to be patient, persistent, calm, have empathy, etc. We also need to be bilingual in English and French, and I saw another ad for German. The search was easy. Writing the résumé a little less easy and writing the cover was even more complicated.

First things first, the résumé. I wrote mine a while back with my dad but I did not have all the experience I have today; so I was mostly concentrating on education.

See how the two differ? The first one includes the high school and the type of diploma I received, and the university in France and Mesa College in San Diego. I graduated from Mesa College since then so I could add this diploma and saying that I was studying at San Diego State University in the new one, and remove the high school and the french university. Also I put the schools in reversed chronological order. The section breathes a little bit more too, the bullet points are not glued to each other; I underlined the school because to me it is a sort of subsection.

Next, the work experience:

First you can see that I accumulated more experience since I did it with my dad. Second, I removed the volunteer work from the new one because it was taking space on the page and it was an internship that I had to do in middle school, so I did not really learn anything besides organising shelves. Instead of having bullet point for this section, I just underlined the companies names and stated my position underneath as well as describe my responsibilities. The date and place of the work are on two different lines instead of together.

Last but not least, skills:

As you can see, my skills changed a little bit too. I can manipulate more computer software and since I work in a restaurant I know how a POS works. For those of you who do not know what a POS is, it is the little computer servers are typing your order in; Aloha is one of many POS system available.

Now let us talk about the cover letter. I think for me it was one of the most difficult part. Let us face it, on a résumé we are just stating our experience and nothing more. A cover letter asks a little more to sell yourself. You have to state your skills and use examples to show how your skills are important. You have to show the company that you are valuable and that you can help them improving. I have a really hard time selling myself because I am still not sure what I am worth. I know I am a hard worker and a fast learner but that is about it. I also did not know where to start. I am not really great at engaging conversation to begin with, so catching the attention of the reader in a cover letter is even more complicated for me. I made it through though!

I hope you are enjoying your summer as much as I do!

Work hard, party hard beautiful people! ‘Til next time.

Signing out.