I walked the three quarters of the mile home with a cheesy smile plastered on my face (seriously, libraries make me so happy) and a few books in my bag that I was excited to try out.

One of them was Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. I was pretty excited about this book, since I’m an engineer by training but have always had one foot in the humanities world and consider parsing geekspeak into normal English among my many talents. A book about the barriers between the general public and the wonders of science and how to tear them down was terrifically appealing to me.

Unfortunately, this book sucked.

The premise the authors lay out is that the general public, and specifically religious conservatives, are mistrustful or fearful or skeptical of science, and that this is a problem which needs to be addressed.

But if these authors represent a public face for the scientific community, it’s no wonder conservatives aren’t biting. They make no effort to hide their liberal bias, scatter the pages with unnecessary jabs at religious conservatives, and seem to take particular glee in vilifying the conservative hero Ronald Reagan. Now, Reagan may well be worthy of criticism when it comes to science, but when they criticize the “Reagan Administration” for being anti-science because of media deregulation that took place during his presidency, then lament the further damage done by the 1996 Telecommunications Act without so much of a hint of the name “Bill Clinton,” it certainly raises some eyebrows. When anti-science things happen during a Republican administration, they get to make biting comments. When anti-science things happen during a Democratic administration, well, that’s just not interesting. In one instance the authors refer to proponents of intelligent design as the “forces of darkness.” I almost stopped reading. A religious discussion may be the least appropriate time to use the Lord’s name in vain, but I can’t help myself: Jesus Christ, you are writing a serious non-fiction book, not a graphic novel. Things like THIS are exactly why religious conservatives don’t like scientists!

But the truly astonishing thing about this book is not that the authors seem to take every opportunity to make comments which will alienate the audience they are most trying to reach. It is that they KNOW that this is counterproductive behavior, because a good portion of the book is dedicated to criticizing scientists for exhibiting it! They spend pages lamenting the nasty and condescending comments often directed at creationists, conservatives and the like, yet managed to name the second-to-last chapter, “Is Our Scientists Learning?” without the slightest hint of irony. Sure, mock a Republican president (again) for no real reason related to your point. That’s a great way to win over conservatives! (Let’s remember that I will be among the first to jump into the “Bush is an idiot” chorus, but I like to think that I’m mature and professional enough that I would be able to refrain from making cheap jokes about his malapropisms when I was trying to garner respect for my ideas by writing a serious text.)

Also, the proposed “solutions” are practically non-existent. An intelligent and complex discussion of the inherent differences between the fields of science and journalism is followed up with the suggestion that scientists be trained in communication skills. Well duh. That’s it- no elaboration, no explanation, just a Captain Obvious comment. The end of each chapter includes a token solution which takes up two paragraphs and isn’t fleshed out with any details at all. They seem like editorial afterthoughts, as if someone in the publishing house said, “Hey, if you include some solutions to these problems we can boast about that on the dust jacket!” They basically are: undergraduate science degrees should require communications classes (which most already do), scientists should take consulting roles in Hollywood (which they already do), and atheists should be nicer to non-atheists (which would be nice and all, but is a little on the flimsy side as solutions to scientific illiteracy go). There you go, I just saved you the trouble of reading through this entire book searching for the “broad array of initiatives” the dust jacket claims are detailed inside.

One of the dangers the authors warn against is the fragmentation of information sources. With modern media, so many options are available that it allows people to “join up with those who think just like they do, in back-scratching communities that rarely encounter anything challenging or unexpected.” It occurs to me that the editing team of this book must have been one such “back-scratching” community, because I cannot imagine any moderately intelligent, self-aware person otherwise allowing this book to go to print. It is so self-oblivious to its own abundant hypocrisy, it’s laughable. Whether the goal of this book was to encourage conservatives to embrace science more openly, or to convince scientists to reach out to conservatives with more respect, it is surely a miserable failure.

See, I just sit around at home all day by myself. Today I did two loads of laundry, washed all the dishes, and for the third night in a row, cooked a delicious home-cooked meal from scratch, and washed all the dishes I used making it while it was baking. I even scrubbed the grease off the stovetop.

Attention all available males my age: One day, I will be delighted to refuse to do any of these things for you.

Seriously, why am I single?

Anyway, I’m trying to keep myself occupied by watching all of the old episodes of Lost and reading a million books. In two weeks I will FINALLY move out of my parents’ house and start living on my own and having my own life and presumably, hopefully, getting to do cool things like hang out with friends and stuff. So in the meantime, I’m cramming as much “lame” into my life as possible.

In the past twelve months, I have been employed as:

1. a professional blogger
2. a math and science tutor
3. a tech support consultant
4. a lifeguard
5. a campaign staffer
6. an office clerk for the U.S. Census

Now, I will get to add:

7. an engineer (you know, the one I wanted to be in the first place).

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I found a job.

Sort of.

It’s less of a “job” and more of an “internship of indeterminate length depending on how well it works out and if I’m actually able to survive on what they pay me and if the company still exists in a few months.” But as we’ve seen, I’m not really a huge fan of stability, so that’s cool with me.

How did I find this job? Funny you should ask. Basically, back before I started giving the U.S. Census 40 hours a week to feast on my soul and happiness, I was puzzling over how to figure out how to even find out about jobs I might potentially want. I spent a lot of time putting every variation of “sustainable international development engineering” I could think of into Google. Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across the website http://www.lightingafrica.org. I can’t really figure out what the website is (it’s some sort of UN-funded initiative, but I can’t really put my finger on what it is they actually do), but what I do know is that it has a directory of companies who seem to be saying “Hey, my company does something that is in some vague way related to the goal of bringing artificial light to Africa.” This was the closest proxy I could find for my dream job (which is probably best described as “saving the world through engineering,” which I realize is pretty vague, so you know, I guess I understand why there isn’t an online directory for that). So I went through all 2,000 companies listed in their member directory and sorted out the cool ones. (I mean, I really had a lot of time on my hands.) Eventually I had a list of 100 or so companies that seemed cool, in no particular order.

The first spot on the list happened to fall to an organization called Mechanical Electric, which is developing a device which can store energy mechanically, with the goal of making renewable energies more reliable. Well, there’s no better place to start than the beginning. So I sent them an email and basically said, “Hey, can I have a job?” I start in two weeks.

Yeah, I can’t really believe that worked either.

Granted, it wasn’t quite that easy. I first emailed them in about December or January, and they said they didn’t really have the money to hire me, but to check back before the summer. So I emailed them again a few weeks ago, and they still didn’t really have the money, but I guess took pity on the MIT grad still unable to find a job. In the meantime, I sent similar emails to a few dozen other companies from the list with varying degrees of success. Obviously nothing came of that in the end, but there were some near successes. The problem with wanting to save the world is that, for some odd reason, there’s not a lot of money in it. Most efforts to save the world are shoestring operations done for glory rather than profit. Which again, I’m totally cool with, but a girl’s gotta eat.

So, I’ll be moving out to the Bay Area, staying with one of my good friends from college (and within spitting distance of another 10 good friends…I know more people in San Fran than in New Jersey, oddly), and doing really, really cool stuff.

Of course, that might only last for the summer, at which point I’ll hopefully be heading to Mexico for this cool master’s program I’ve been applying to, or else starting all over again trying to find a “real” job.

Like I said, stability is overrated.

Ex: “By the way, did you know that you’re in the 2008 Edition of Newsweek’s college edition?”
Me: “Ha, you saw that, huh?” [In a past life, I was a student blogger for the MIT Admissions website. MIT was the first school to have such a program, so I occasionally got interview requests from educationally-themed news sources looking to write a feature about it.]
Ex: “Yeah, I was waiting for the shower to heat up and just grabbed a random magazine that was in the bathroom, opened to an article that looked interesting, and saw your name. I was like ‘Holy shit I dated that girl!’ ”
Me: “Oh, so you enjoy living vicariously through me? You can tell people, ‘Hey, check out Newsweek, page 50. Yeah, I dated her.’”
Ex: “Well, it’s not as cool as your ex being in Maxim or anything, but yeah, sorta.”
Me: “Sorry, next time I’ll aim for a racier publication, for your sake.”

The joys of being very, very slightly famous.

I decided the best way to extract my revenge would be to write a sarcastic reply, spoofing their email and providing a critique of their abilities as a con artist. I happily emailed it a couple of days after receiving my critique and several follow-up inquiries. I never heard from them again.

Now, you might ask, “But Laura, what good did it really do to write a mean and spiteful letter to these people?” That’s a very fair question. And the answer is quite simple.

It felt really, really, really good. =)

Enjoy.

(Note: For reference, you can see the full text of what was sent to me here.)

———————————-
Dear Madeline,

I’m the scam expert that was assigned to critique your attempt to swindle vulnerable unemployed job seekers out of hundreds of dollars. I reviewed your resume critique with the goal of giving you an honest, straightforward assessment of your recent critique, and not a judgment of your potential to make people curl into the fetal position and cry while opening their wallets for you. I should warn you about my style: I’m direct and to the point, so I hope you won’t be offended by my comments. (Instead, I hope you will become so despondent and depressed by the end of my criticism of you that you will jump at the chance to pay me an inordinate amount of money to help yourself feel better. But forget I said that.) My perspective is that a scam needs to be so complete that the marks forget that it is even a scam. In a perfect world, professional resume writers would be selected based on the precision of their computer-generated resume critiques. In reality, this isn’t how the process works. An unemployed person will know that you, Madeline, never actually laid eyes on his or her resume. So your cruel and unnecessarily harsh generic statements need to do the heavy lifting to make them so miserable and desperate that they forget it was all a lie anyway.

Here’s the good news: my first impression of you is that you are off to a good start in your scam. You’re an up and coming resume “expert”, with a lot of vitriol of offer. Now, here’s the bad news: your critique isn’t doing a good job using that effectively against your potential marks. I found it to be weak, only slightly biting, and unlikely to sufficiently destroy anyone’s spirit. If you were selling yourself as Dick Cheney, it’s as if your resume is saying “unpleasant politician.” Which one would be more likely to make you fearfully compliant?

Your scam email needs a boost from a visual, content, and organizational standpoint to engage the reader. Your target audience is people who are already downtrodden, dejected, and quite possibly even clinically depressed. But you need to really drive home your criticism, to make them feel even more hopeless than usual and convince them that you are a legitimate service that is actually interested in helping them. (As you know, these are no small tasks!)

Here are the major issues I see with your scam:

VISUAL PRESENTATION

Your design is very flat. The appearance is not polished, and doesn’t say Trustworthy Internet Service. By way of example, it’s like the difference between a professionally structured scam written by a highly organized network of tech-savvy Nigerian princes using the latest techniques in phishing, and a 13-year-old trying to convince her friends that they will fall in love at 10:22 PM tomorrow if they forward an email about a vanishing hitchhiker to 7 people in the next 7 minutes.

CONTENT

As I was reading your critique I was trying to imagine myself as a desperate and gullible unemployed person, looking for a way to spend $400 I don’t have. I then asked myself whether I would have been left feeling miserable and dejected enough to pick your service. I concluded that much of the criticism was lackluster and that in many instances it was not detailed enough to make your potential mark forget that your only goal with the critique was to sell them something.

There were some shining examples of truly cruel comments, but overall the wording was not impressive. Here are some examples of lackluster criticisms that don’t live up to the nastiness you demonstrated in other paragraphs.

* Lastly, I’m a little concerned that you won’t be found in resume databases.
* There were some disagreements in case and punctuation.

These statements are lacking in the forceful power to shatter the soul of an already dejected job seeker. It would be like you saying, “I am cruel to people,” when you could have said, “I am so mean, even Kanye West thinks I’m an asshole.” Which sounds more impressive?

ADDITIONAL ISSUES

I am concerned that your resume critiques will not get you noticed by potential marks. A well designed email scam includes keywords and phrasing that makes it easy for spam filtering to mistake it for a legitimate email, and hard for human readers to detect the overpowering amounts of bullshit at the core of the message.

NEXT STEPS

Most people aren’t like you – they make money through applying their skills honestly, without resorting to cruelly preying on vulnerable people who are facing the toughest job market in decades, possible foreclosure, the need to change fields in the middle of their careers, and who are wondering if $400 would be better spent to give them a “better” resume and a chance at a honest job, or feeding their children. Luckily for you, that’s where we come in.

Countless studies have proven that people who aren’t complete slimebuckets are happier in life, and if it shortens your miserable self-loathing by even one day, a professional soul-cleansing will pay for itself.

Purchasing the right redemption service is important. You want to be sure you are getting everything you need to move on from your disgraceful treatment of other human beings without being nickel and dimed. Money is tight for everyone but there is no price on being a good person. Countless studies have proven that people who aren’t complete slimebuckets are happier in life, and if it shortens your miserable self-loathing by even one day, a professional soul-cleansing will pay for itself.

The Deluxe Redemption package includes:

* A Professionally Written Apology to all of the people you’ve needlessly made feel miserable about themselves just so you could make a sale
* 3 day retreat in a natural setting to give you time to think about all of the people you’ve hurt
* Authentic-looking replacement mirror with an imprint of an artist’s representation of what you would look like as a decent human being, so you don’t have to look at yourself until you’re ready
* Sleeping pills, just in case the ability to sleep at night doesn’t return immediately

What’s the process once I purchase?

1. We will assign a spiritual leader to you who has experience redeeming souls in your industry.
2. We will send you a questionnaire that will get you thinking a little differently about your career and what you have to offer. It will help you discover potentially positive personal attributes you might have to offer society.
3. Once your apology has been sent to the countless people you trashed for your own personal benefit, you will be sent on a 3-day retreat with your spiritual counselor to discuss how you can go on living with yourself now that your eyes have been opened to how much of a total bottom-feeding scumbag you really are.

It was a pleasure reviewing your scam and providing you with this critique.

Please give me a call if you would like to discuss more details about our resume writing service. I’m here to help. You can reach me at 1-800-URA-DICK.

Best Regards,
Laura Nicholson
Decent Human Being Consultant

———————————-

Hardly anyone believes me when I say this, but I actually hate Valentine’s Day more when I’m in a relationship, because there’s this inescapable expectation that somehow we must not only do something “special” and buy each other things to celebrate Hallmark’s profit earnings but that we might just even love each other more on February 14 than we did on February 13 or will on February 15. Also, the gender stereotype thing. There have been some interesting conversations with significant others. “No, really. I do. not. want. flowers. I do not want chocolate. I do not want ANYTHING. This is not a trick. Buy me flowers and die.” Ask them, they’ll tell you.

So today was actually kind of nice. I haven’t been on a date in several months, haven’t kissed a guy in over a year, had a serious relationship in over three or been in love in over six. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, six years. Valentine’s Day was not only joyously irrelevant to me this year, but a bare shadow of a memory.

Given how much free time I have on my hands, I decided to assign myself a full courseload. Remedial Calc, Economics, French, and Things I Really Should Have Learned in College But Somehow Didn’t. I got a surprisingly amount of studying done. I will take implicit differentiation and the six sigma method of quality control over sappy love songs and heart shaped chocolate boxes any day of the week. (Which really is saying a lot, because while calculus is cool and useful, six sigma is hardly captivating.)

And now, just a few minutes before the day is officially over, enjoy the following ballad of love.

But I am a member of the MIT Alumni group on LinkedIn, so I get daily updates about group activity. Apparently someone posted a recent Slice of MIT blog entry to the group page. It was titled Need a Job? so I clicked through to the page, assuming it would be useful to me. Turns out it was only a boring news piece about the career fair that happened last week. But not only that, this is how the entry begins:

It’s a known fact that most students that graduate from MIT jump right into respectable careers, and for good reason! A one-of-a-kind education, opportunities to conduct research in world class labs, and several other reasons make MIT a breeding pool for career-ready individuals.

Oh, just rub it in, why don’t you?

I’ve been following a couple of unemployment blogs lately, and they’re always warning against scams. There are lousy people out there, always looking to make a quick buck off of the insecure and vulnerable- and who is more insecure and vulnerable than the average unemployed schmuck these days, who has likely been laid off by a company they’ve worked at for years, been unemployed for several months by now, is facing foreclosure on their house, and facing the possibility that they might have to change fields altogether or take a job flipping burgers despite a decade of experience in finance (or wherever) just to make ends meet? No one, that’s who.

I never really doubted that such scams existed, but I never really considered the possibility of encountering one until today.

Sometime last week I created an account at jobfox.com. It’s a pretty new site, from what I can tell, and they have an interesting search method- they basically mine data from your resume and try to match it with keywords in job postings to give you “likely matches.” It’s a really cool concept, which totally failed in my case. I’m a recent college grad who was involved in everything under the sun for the last four years. I loved all my experiences, and I know each of them gave me incredible and useful skills, but none of them are strictly related to my career aspirations. I shrugged it off as a fluke (for all I know, the site works well for others), but before I signed off the site without much intent to return (I can’t see a way to search for jobs on my own terms, so I am literally only able to see positions that don’t match my real qualifications at all), I checked the box next to “get a free resume critique from jobfox.com!” Why the hell not, right?

Today I had an email in my inbox from one Madeline Willis, telling me that my resume critique was ready and I could view the comments online.

Well. I did. And now I’m fucking pissed.

I’ll admit, at first I wasn’t reading too closely. It was long, so I started skimming. This was the first thing I saw:

Your design is very flat…by way of example, it’s like the difference between a professionally printed brochure, and one that was done at home and printed on an inkjet printer.

Ouch. That seemed unnecessarily harsh. “They must be trying to sell me something,” I thought. But I kept skimming. And it just kept going. I kept reading, waiting to find the part where they want me to pay them something, but all I found was an endless sea of criticism. After awhile I forgot that I ever thought it was a scam.

I found [your resume] to be drab, uninspiring, and unlikely to catch anyone’s attention…For people at your skill level, I’m used to seeing much stronger visual appeal…I concluded that much of the information was superficial …[If I were a hiring manager] I wouldn’t remember you…you come across as a “doer” not an “achiever.”

A sliver of doubt entered my mind. I’m sure my resume isn’t perfect, but I spent a lot of time on it, and had it critiqued by the MIT Careers Office through several iterations. I figured it was at least alright, maybe even better than average. But wow, now it sounds like it’s the worst resume ever written.

Keep in mind, I am reading this as someone who graduated from a top-notch school, let’s see…8 months ago, and is still unemployed. My emotional state is a little fragile here. I don’t want to tell you how many times I’ve collapsed on the floor in tears over this mess I’m in over the past few weeks. I don’t want to go into detail about the dark thoughts that force their way into my mind as I try to fall asleep (they’re nothing short of “my entire life plan is irrevocably destroyed and I will never be able to find a job in my chosen profession for the rest of my life.”) I store tissues under my pillow lately.

And now it turns out my resume sucks. The more I read, the more panicked I became.

Then I read:

Most people are like you – they struggle to put themselves down on paper effectively, but that’s where we come in….The Jobfox Deluxe Package includes…

Oh, thank God! It was a scam after all! I suddenly started breathing easier, knowing I could completely disregard everything they said. (Not only that, after careful inspection, I found a lot of their claims to be demonstrably false.)

But now, instead of panicked, I was pissed. I went back and started from the beginning, reading more carefully.

I should warn you about my style: I’m direct and to the point, so I hope you won’t be offended by my comments.

Ha! Translation: “I should warn you about my style: I’m direct and to the point. My hope is that you will feel so beaten and depressed by how shitty I tell you your resume is, that by the time you finish reading, you’ll be willing to cough up 400 bucks for me to fix it.”

That’s right. FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS. (I laughed at myself when I remembered being annoyed that a particular job search engine wanted to charge a registration fee of $19.99.) Of course, if you’re unemployed and can’t drop $399 on a professional resume service, you can pay it in monthly installments instead. Just six easy payments of $69.95! (Which actually adds up to $419.70. I guess they charge interest.)

The letter ends with the contact information of this Miss Madeline Willis, and I will be taking complete advantage of this. You can expect to hear from me, you slimy piece of crap.

No one likes used car salesmen for a reason. People find it slightly icky, at the very least, when other people are trying to push a sale on them. It’s bad enough to have someone pushing a sale on you. (I should know, I just got two phone calls and an email about a “job application” I filled out for a teaching position at a post-secondary institution which turned out to not be a job but a way to “partially subsidize the cost of tuition once you enroll with us.” On the topic of job scams and all…) But when you try to sell something to someone by making them feel like absolute crap, that’s low. And in today’s tough economy and competitive job market giving people enough stress at it is, this is tantamount to kicking someone while they’re down, curled in a fetal position, sucking their thumb and crying. All so you can get them to open their wallet to you. How disgusting.

It turns out that “TheLadders” (which is a a complete lie in and of itself) does the same thing. They’ll even write scathing critiques of resumes they’ve written. Some scumbags just aren’t smart enough to keep track of what they’re doing, I guess.

I’m trying to decide exactly how to proceed here. Should I just send this woman a nasty email? Should I actually call her? Demand to speak to her manager? I mean, it’s not like I can convince them to not be slimebuckets or anything, and I’ll probably just get hung up on. But I bet it will feel so, so good. Let off some frustration at people who really deserve it. Thoughts?

(Update: Read about my response to the letter here.)

———————————————————-
Here’s the full nearly full text of the email I received:

Dear Laura,

I’m the Jobfox resume expert that was assigned to critique your resume. I reviewed your resume with the goal of giving you an honest, straightforward assessment of your current resume, and not a judgment of your skills and qualifications. I should warn you about my style: I’m direct and to the point, so I hope you won’t be offended by my comments. My perspective is that resumes get chosen, not candidates. In a perfect world, interview candidates would be selected based on their strengths and experiences. In reality, this isn’t how the process works. A recruiter chooses the short list of candidates from a pile of resumes. Meaning, we have to make sure your resume does the heavy lifting in the selection process.
Here’s the good news: my first impression of you is that you are off to a good start in your career. You’re an up and coming Mechanical Engineer, with a lot to offer an employer. Now, here’s the bad news: your resume isn’t doing a good job saying that to an employer. I found it to be drab, uninspiring, and unlikely to catch anyone’s attention. If you were selling yourself as Sizzling Grilled Steak, it’s as if your resume is saying “cooked meat.” Which one would you want?

Your resume needs a boost from a visual, content, and organizational standpoint to engage the reader. It needs to make them want to learn more about you. I didn’t find it to be exciting and it didn’t make me want to run to the phone to call you. These days, employers are being flooded with resumes, and we need yours to compel a hiring manager to continue reading and contact you for an interview. Countless studies have proven that resume quality is the key determinant as to whether a candidate is selected to be interviewed.

……

Here are the major issues I see on your resume:

VISUAL PRESENTATION
Your design is very flat. The appearance is not polished, and doesn’t say high potential Engineering professional. By way of example, it’s like the difference between a professionally printed brochure, and one that was done at home and printed on an inkjet printer…

CONTENT
As I was reading your resume I was trying to imagine myself as a hiring manager, looking for that ideal Mechanical Engineer. I then asked myself whether I’d have picked your resume, and whether it was memorable. I concluded that much of the information was superficial and that in many instances it was too brief. Simply put, I wouldn’t remember you. There are a lot of words on your resume, but they’re not formulated into powerful and impactful statements….
From the way the resume is worded, you come across as a “doer” not an “achiever.”….Here are some examples of task based sentences in your resume.

• Performed experimental tests of Bluetooth signal reliability

• Designed and performed experiments to study curing rates of photosensitive resins

These statements are more about what you did, not what you achieved. It would be like you saying “I played tennis last week” when you could have said “I won the tennis tournament at my local racquet club last week unseating the person that held the title for the past three years.” Which sounds more impressive?

Additional Issues
Lastly, I’m a little concerned that you won’t be found in resume databases. A well-designed resume includes the keywords and formatting that makes it easy for a resume parsing machine to learn about you and route you to a decision maker…

NEXT STEPS
Most people are like you – they struggle to put themselves down on paper effectively, but that’s where we come in. All the recommendations above can be combined in a cohesive, strategic manner so that you can distinguish yourself from other candidates. Our resume writers are experts in doing this. Countless studies have proven that professionally written resumes get more interviews, and, if it shortens your job search by even one day, a professional resume will pay for itself.
Purchasing the right resume writing service is important. You want to be sure you are getting everything you need to be successful in your job search without being nickel and dimed. We designed our package to be affordable by spreading the payments over a six (6) month timeframe. Money is tight for everyone but getting back to work with the best possible income is the goal. Countless studies have proven that professionally written resumes get more interviews, and, if it shortens your job search by even one day, a professional resume will pay for itself.

The Jobfox Deluxe package includes:
A Professionally Written Resume
A Cover Letter
An Electronic Version of your resume
Keyword Optimization

What’s the process once I purchase?
1.We will assign a resume writer to you who has experience writing for your industry.
2.We will send you a questionnaire that will get you thinking a little differently about your career and what you have to offer. It will help you discover your skills, qualifications, and personal attributes.
3.The writer will complete the first draft of your resume within 4 to 6 business days.
4.Once you are completely happy with your new resume, the writer will finalize the document for you and send it to you in two formats…

It was a pleasure reviewing your resume and providing you with this critique.
Please give me a call if you would like to discuss more details about our resume writing service. I’m here to help. You can reach me at 1-877-456-2369 x1115.
You can also e-mail me at madeline_w@jobfox.com.

Best Regards,
Madeline Willis
Candidate Service Consultant

Despite the fact that I’ve been job searching off-and-on for oh, about a YEAR now (I had a summer job for a few months, plus a volunteer position for another one, which interrupted the process to varying degrees) it hadn’t really bothered me much. I figured eventually something would work out.

But I guess my most recent rejection letter was just the last straw, which has finally convinced me that I will just never ever be employed.

Two days ago, I applied to a completely basic, simple, straightforward posting for an “entry level mechanical engineer.” Today I got a rejection letter for it.

I would just like to ask: if I’m not qualified to be an entry level mechanical engineer, what the hell AM I qualified to be? I mean, an entry level mechanical engineer is EXACTLY what I am, BY DEFINITION.

So my bigger question is really, what exactly am I supposed to do now? I didn’t suffer through four years of MIT so I could get a nice cushy high-paying job. I really didn’t. I suffered through four years of MIT because I liked the place in a weird, twisted, masochistic way. I kept at it through the worst so that one day I could get A job. ANY job. Preferably one that I enjoyed or found meaningful or fulfilling, but really, just a job.

But apparently my mechanical engineering degree is not enough to qualify me to be an entry-level mechanical engineer. (Again, this is not a conclusion that I’m only drawing from one case today, but also all the others before it.) So I repeat, what exactly am I qualified for?

Maybe I can convince Starbucks that my mechanical engineering degree will help me understand how to operate the espresso machine.

I know I’m being overly dramatic and gloomy here, but it’s hard not to be when this issue literally consumes my whole life. I spend every day sitting at home wading through job postings and watching reruns of NCIS. On any given day, I am only guaranteed to interact with one person- my mother. Sometimes that includes my father, and on overly stimulating days when I babysit it includes a 10 month old baby. I leave the house about once a week to go grocery shopping. I think I have refilled my gas tank once, maybe twice in the last 2 months. The only thing that I did today besides eat, sleep, and cry about job searching was to get into a flame war with someone on Amazon’s review forums.

It’s a pretty depressing existence to begin with, and I honestly don’t know how to drag myself out of it.

I will probably hate them for the absolute rest of my fucking life.

Why? Because in their infinite greed, they fucked up the economy so hard as to render my engineering degree from MI-fucking-T effectively worthless.

I don’t think I feel unjustly entitled- I think it’s perfectly fair that after EIGHT years of studying engineering at some of the best possible schools, I should expect to be able to find employment in engineering.

Or employment in ANYTHING, for that matter. I’ve been applying to random postings on Craigslist, jobs that only require a GED and some mechanical knowledge…

Meanwhile, the bankers who have utterly failed in their jobs get bonuses of $1,000,000.

Fuck you guys.

Seriously. Allow me to point out that this figure is a BONUS- in addition to their annual pay. I just want 20 grand- a measly TWO PERCENT of their ADDITIONAL pay for the next YEAR in exchange for working long hours on difficult tasks.

Maybe that’s greedy of me- technically the poverty line for a single person is about $10,000 per year, but since I don’t live in the MidWest I think it’s fair to adjust somewhat for cost of living.

I was incredibly lucky to receive a fantastic financial aid package in college- I only have about $7,000 in student loans to pay off, starting in March.

It’s absolutely ABSURD that I should be worried about paying off a 4 digit loan immediately after graduation- again, from one of the TOP SCHOOLS in the WORLD. I can only imagine what it must be like for people who have much higher loan amounts to pay off.

I spent most of today trying not to cry.

To quote one of my favorite TV characters, Liz Lemon: “Everything’s the worst.”