The Empty Résumé Is A Blessing And A Curse: Filling The New Year With What Matters

“My actions are my only true belongings.”

—Thích Nhất Hạnh

When I was a freshman in college, the Career Center informed me that I should avoid all mention of high school in my application to a prestigious summer program. “Anything you did before college looks childish on a CV,” my mentor explained.

This was a problem. Without all my carefully knit accomplishments and awards from high school, I felt like a nobody, like I didn't exist. 
Because the truth was that after a whole year at college, I had nothing to put on my CV.

The application for the summer program I wanted to attend had three blank pages set aside for the task. Although the application had asked for my GPA elsewhere, I toyed with writing it again, as if to say, “Isn’t this enough? What else do you want from me?”

As I sat there, I thought about those students I’d heard about who had 40-hour-a-week jobs at the school newspaper, who had research positions with famous professors, who were building startups and touring bands and performing standup routines. In my dorm, Mike from across the hall was on the boxing team, Mike my roommate was in a fraternity that did charity work, and even down-the-hall-Mike who somehow dropped his laptop out the window was building submarine robots in the evenings. I barely had time to do laundry. Who had time to build robots?

In high school, I had spent all of my energy collecting shiny credentials. It had been very painful to learn upon coming to college that the standardized test scores I had fetishized were now meaningless, that the AP tests I studied so hard for would never be useful, that the thousand other little games I had played to get me into college were just that—games. But I had learned my lesson. No more meaningless clubs. No more sports I didn’t like. No more studying only for the grades. This was college. I would be uncompromising in my devotion to learning and shift my life once and for all into the warm, loving hands of moral and intellectual rigor. The worst thing I could do, I told myself, was spend four more years working on the shiny surface of my life instead of on my intellectual soul.

That idealistic mindset took a few blows as I sat staring at my empty CV. To make matters worse, the follow-up questions all asked, through various euphemisms, “What else do you do besides school?” How many different ways did they want me to say it? Nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada. It was beginning to dawn on me that the reviewers would not be able to see how much I had studied all year, how pure my intentions had been, how creatively I had tackled the year’s assignments. I could have spent the whole year drunk and ended up with the same CV. This was intolerable to me, but I did my best to explain in the follow-up questions and submitted my application. I hoped that my single-minded dedication would strike a reviewer as endearing.

Unfortunately, we live in a world that rarely rewards pure intentions, especially when all other applicants build businesses and robots. The interviewer of the prestigious summer program flipped through his folder in the final round of interviews and asked if a document was missing.

“I hope not,” I said. “What are you looking for?”

“Your CV.”

The interviewer did not, as I hoped he might, ask about the “real” me. He did not ask about all the things that would never appear on an official document, like the complimentary notes professors made in the margins of my papers. He didn’t ask whether I’d intentionally tackled the hardest essay questions and read all the required and suggested readings, despite the fact that they wouldn’t be on the exams. He didn’t ask if I’d slept in the library for five days during finals, leaving only to change my clothes. And he didn’t ask whether I had received a handshake and a smile from a notoriously difficult professor when he handed back my final paper. The interviewer frowned and said, “Why don’t you get more involved in your community and reapply next year.”

I spent the summer they way I had so many summers before: teaching tennis lessons to five-year-olds and spoiled teenagers in Flint, Michigan. After nine months of reading the world’s greatest philosophers and poets, I was held hostage for twelve hours a day by the maniacally repetitive pop station that blared over the loud speakers. Life clarified for me in that boiling, deafening athletic facility: the world wasn’t going to give me things because I felt I deserved them. I had known this in a vague sort of way before, but now I understood it down to my sore feet and bleeding ears. My idealistic mindset was going to have unpleasant consequences, and I either had to bail or deal with them.

I could have returned to college that fall and signed up for every organization on campus—and for many people this would have been the right choice. But doing so would have only led me away from the things I cared about most. Instead, I continued to develop my writing. I read stacks of books. I had long conversations with like-minded classmates about poetry and philosophy.

Updating my CV has since become a spiritual-ish practice. A tiring metaphysical burden of sorts, I admit, but the process is nevertheless a useful means of reflection. It helps keep me honest and humble. It is one more way to make sure I am who I say I am and that I am becoming the person I want to be.

We can choose to spend time building up a document full of meaningless activities, or we can fill this document with actions and accomplishments that matter. As much as we might be loath to admit it, a catalogue of publicly recognized actions does say something useful about who we are, and who we really are is more apparent than we think. Our CVs are either empty due to beer bongs or difficult course work. But the larger point is that a CV is simply a tool—a rather blunt one, at first—that we can use to tell strangers a true story about ourselves. And this is a good thing because telling true stories resonates with people, even interviewers.

By the end of my undergraduate career, my CV was still short but in an honest and sturdy way I was no longer ashamed of. Because of all the time I spent writing and reading, my application essays and cover letters began to stand out. The work I put into my classes paid off in all sorts of unexpected ways. A couple of my reference letters were so complimentary that they moved me to tears. These documents provided the context that my modest CV needed in order to be competitive.

The following year, I was accepted into a very fine graduate program, and on the first day of class, I sighed, deleted my CV, and set about the steady work of refilling it.

For the start of this new year, I encourage you to start two (2) new curriculum vitae with me. I make one document for myself, a list of accomplishments that range from very small (writing this article) to very large (finishing edits on a documentary), and they contain both professional (winning a grant) and personal (completing six months of couple's therapy; visiting my sister) accomplishments.

The second document is strictly for work. This document holds me accountable to what I did and did not manage to get done.

One document is often uplifting, the other humbling, but both are necessary.

In 2021, I'm hoping they look nothing alike.

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About the author: J. Preston Witt is a fiction writer, playwright, script consultant, and writing professor.