I won’t deny that I was one student who spent most of my time building up my resumé. Since I got my first part-time job, I worked at adding more details to my resumé, hoping that someday it would help convince prospective employers that I was the one.
After graduation, I couldn’t be happier with my resumé. Aside from the basic information, I was able to fill up the spaces for affiliation, publication, conferences attended and work experience in a telecommunications company, an NGO and the academe, to boot. That I was .05 away from graduating magna cum laude was certainly frustrating, but I kept it to myself since I felt that I was more than blessed already.
But not all seemingly winning resumés, including a UP diploma, can open doors easily. I had my share of rejections, most memorably from a software company in Eastwood and a multinational giant in Makati. Both companies required applicants to take an exam to test logic and analytical skills, and both times I wasn’t even given the chance to take the test. (It must have been my major, which is mass communication, but still…) So much for my confidence and documented skills.
It’s a depressing experience really for people like me who have the tendency to equate their worth with a failed test, and ask questions like: What am I good for? How stupid can I get? It was impossible not to take it personally.
Job hunting became easier when I accepted the fact that I couldn’t get a job that required a lot of logical thinking. I was never the type to perform awesome feats of mental math, let alone solve brain teasers. My only redeeming quality is the ability to write or blab about something for an extended period of time, and perhaps to make quick decisions on what needs to be thrown into the garbage can.
Life is certainly easier when you don’t have to prove that you are smarter all the time. There’s nothing quite like the real world to put us in “our place.”
In Jakarta, UP is not as popular as the universities in Singapore or Australia. To my students, I am just another Filipino teacher, though their faces light up when I tell them about the “Oblation Run,” or going through initiation rites. Of course, my Pinoy co-workers are familiar with UP, but I never volunteer the information although they still ask anyway. Coming from UP, I feel that I have to be a beacon of intellectualism, work ethics and such and such. I am afraid that if I mess up my grammar or paperwork, or show less-than-perfect behavior, someone who has read Conan O’Brien’s famous speech would ask, “And you went to UP?”
But like I tell my students, making mistakes is part of the learning process and is perhaps the best way to remember a lesson. Taking my own pill, I have become more comfortable laughing at my own mistakes, apologizing for lapses in judgment, and even admitting that I am not up to something, yet. Life gets better when we act more humanly.
Maybe it would help if we listed down our greatest mistakes in our resumé—and what we learned from them. Suddenly, Venus Raj’s famous Q&A comes to mind.
Christine Elizabeth J. Macaraig, 25, teaches in an international school in Jakarta.
Lessons
By Jasmine N. Shewakramani
THEY TAUGHT you a lot of things when you were growing up.
They told you that spinach will make you strong, and that you have to finish your vegetables (just think of all the starving children in Africa), yes even the peas. They told you never to go swimming an hour after eating or you would get stomach cramps. They told you to finish your homework on time and go to bed early otherwise you will be naughty and Santa won’t bring you presents on Christmas Day. They told you to jump as high as you could on New Year’s Eve so you would grow tall. They told you that a kiss makes any hurt feel better.
When you were in school, you were conditioned to think that there is always something that comes after. Your years were broken into periods of time that made it easy to segment your life: first semester and second semester, or first quarter, second quarter, third quarter and fourth quarter. You believed there would always be some downtime for you, a time when you could reflect on your life so far and reinvent yourself, should you see the need for it. You called it summer.
And the cycle went from year to year because there would always be another year to follow the present. Another school year filled with days that were the same but also different.
Then they taught you a lot of things about growing up.
They told you to always keep an extra P100 in a secret compartment in your wallet, just in case. They told you to pack an extra shirt if it was raining so you won’t look like a drowned rat. They told you that if you ever found yourself in a rally and were in danger of being beaten up by the police, take a good look at them so that you could identify them afterwards. They told you that cramps hurt like a steamroller, but there was no need to worry since you would have them every month only for some 40 years or so. They told you that the best way to avoid a hangover was to always stay drunk. But please don’t do that at your graduation.
Make the most out of everything, they told you. But for what?
Now, there’s nothing after this—nothing that is set for you, anyway. They never told you what it would feel like when you are at the end of the line, when nobody is making your schedules and defining your life based on the academic calendar. When “summer” can happen anytime you like. When you can stay out as late as you want and go anywhere (as long as you have the cash), because you don’t have things like homework and exams curtailing your moves. When you are finally, totally in control of your own destiny.
But then all of a sudden you are paying taxes and worrying about things like medical care, and you find yourself paying for everything instead of mooching off your parents. You are thinking about work and whether you will be home for dinner. You have to make plans to see friends because you don’t see them every day like you used to.
They taught you a lot of things about growing up. But they never told you that after you get your diploma, life changes drastically. They never told you that you never really become an adult. You suddenly realize that you are one.
Jasmine N. Shewakramani, 20, graduated last March from St. Scholastica’s College Manila with a degree in AB Mass Communications and now works at Hinge Inquirer Publications.