With that background, let’s go through some of my favorite missteps from the resumes I received last week — what I have referred to around the office* as my “best-ofs…”

Uniqueness is a good thing, but it is not the only thing. Also, if you have a light resume (short background), do not use an extra small font and thin margins, and then painfully fill in the rest with fluff. One candidate included the following on her professional resume: babysitting. It wasn’t at the bottom, listed with interests, but it was followed by a lengthy description of the duties involved. Like I said, if your resume is light, use bigger text, and accentuate your studies: classes taken, clubs and activities. Unfortunately, her education component was listed at the very bottom, and made up only two lines.

Others included every interest they could think of: the ability “to checkmate with a single rook and king,” designing model airplanes, Rubik’s cube. I love quirkiness; it does get noticed. But stressing uniqueness — what is being instructed at colleges these days — is not the only answer. You do not need to be unique; you must be uniquely qualified. There is a difference. In a follow-up email I received this morning, a candidate added two items to her resume (that she had attached) from the one she handed me last week. A resume is always a work in progress, so this should not be frowned upon, and it wasn’t. To her list of interests, she added knitting and cheese. Great add.

No one cares what your SAT scores were. And worse, if your SAT scores were so great, why is your college GPA only average? (You should think about this before listing your SAT scores.) GRE scores also do not mean much — you got into grad school, now do the work. Speaking of GPA averages, three decimal places is too much. 3.704 vs. 3.70 vs. 3.7. Which one looks the best? Which one says that you are proud and that you also do not have a tendency to embellish?

Here is the nasty secret that no one wants to accept: your GPA doesn’t mean anything. I realize that it is difficult to not include your GPA on your resume when you’re in school — I did it too, and it is the only clear measurement that differentiates you from your classmates — but it should be done tactfully. Over time, however, where you went to school and what degree you earned are the only items that will be discussed. Relevant work experience will be much more important than college grades.

Schooling is not experience in itself. One candidate spent (presumably) four years in South Korea earning his Bachelor’s degree. Then he went to Berkeley and earned his Master’s degree. Then he went to Stanford and earned another Master’s degree. Then he returned to Berkeley and will be finishing his PhD after five years this May. Unfortunately, he is not hirable because he has no valuable experience that would match his salary requirements. PhD’s are dead-ends. Sorry.

The objective statement on a resume is tricky. It is often a throwaway sentence (and sometimes not even a sentence), but it is the first line on the resume, and it shouldn’t even be there in the first place. Your objective should be highlighted in a cover letter, the most important part of a four-piece package that you send to potential employers (the resume, a list of references, and a list of projects, if applicable, are the other three).

The cover letter should summarize — in words, sentence and paragraph form — your relevant experience and what you are looking for, why the company in question interests you, and why the company in question should be interested in you. The cover letter is the granddaddy. The resume just goes along for the ride.

One student wrote that his objective is to begin a career as an environmental engineer “to help mitigate humanity’s impact around the world.” That is not what environmental engineers do, and that is not what environmental engineering is all about. That may be the punch-line or advertising gimmick for the field, but the majority of environmental engineers work for the Chevrons and ExxonMobils and GEs of the world to help them get past the regulations that are inconveniently imposed by law. Environmental engineers skew findings and analyses — be it in an ethical manner — to assist their client’s (or company’s) needs and wants. It is not the other way around. This should be taught in college.

Long lists should be avoided. If you have a light resume, instead of listing odd-ball jobs in high school — and reiterating their importance — you should list coursework and class projects that are relevant. But this is not an open invite to list every class you have taken since freshman year, and you should especially not do this when you do have experience, and require two pages as a result of including such a list. Coming out of college, your resume should be limited to one page (and if you have published numerous papers while in college, and cannot fit them on one page, include that as a separate list of publications, along with the projects and references in the package).

Photos are unnecessary. One person included her photo in the upper-right corner. Maybe this is the future, I don’t know. Instead of the photo, maybe include a link to your LinkedIn or Facebook profile… Where is this going? On the subject of vanity, spelling (and punctuation) is important. One person misspelled “Berkeley.” Not good.

Language counts. I need to hear you, and I need to understand you. Many people are deservedly nervous when meeting a potential employer, and that is fine, but remember that you are always being graded. One candidate wrote on his resume that he is able to “write, read and speak with high fluency in Arabic.” Unfortunately, when I met him he couldn’t speak a lick of English. I would love to see this on a resume: “Although I’m Middle Eastern, I speak wonderful English. Call me and find out.” Now we’re getting somewhere.

This is not a xenophobic diatribe. Communication is key to a successful working environment. Engineers provide advice to clients. We tell them our opinions and findings, and steer their decisions. Clients need our thoughts and opinions to be documented in reports (so they can prove to regulators that their decisions make sense). These reports are mostly in English. There are companies that need factories of engineers — working away on computer models in cubicles, never to see the light of day or meet a client. Mine is not one of them.

* It is true; we scrutinize potential employee resumes.

I tried avoiding the punishment. I let the answering machine pick-up, although I always did, no matter who the caller. I liked the fact that every caller was forced to listen to my outgoing message, the opening riff of Two of Us — “I ain’t dig a pygmy…” When I finally returned the call to the administrative office, the woman retorted, “Screening your calls, eh?” I didn’t really answer her sarcastic question; I didn’t think I had to. It was my freshman year at Syracuse. I was eighteen years old.

A month or so earlier, I had been caught smoking marijuana in my dorm room. I was with my girlfriend at the time, and my best pal Joe. The lesson is do not smoke joints (or blunts) in dorm rooms, because no matter what you do or how hard you try, the smoke and smell do not go away quickly enough. It’s the paper.

Joe had left the room, but my girlfriend stayed behind. I was probably going to put-in a VHS tape of South Park or something, although it really didn’t matter since her room was down the hall. It was less than ten minutes since Joe left when the door was knocked. You could hear the sternness of the knock, nothing like the random knocking of fellow dorm-floor freshmen, planning some random trip around campus. This was serious. I cannot recall if there was a second knock, but before I had time to react, the voice came. “This is campus police.”

Okay. This is where it pays to be patient, and to play the part. The worst thing anyone could do in a situation like this (and mind you, this was not that serious of a situation: I was in my dorm room, and it smelled like pot; I wasn’t driving, I wasn’t buying or selling, I was just stoned) is over-react and panic. I grabbed what was left of the bag of marijuana — and there was probably a good amount remaining — and hid it in my closet between several layers of bath towels. A person who would’ve over-reacted would likely have thrown their stash out the window in a state of frenzy, but let’s be realistic: the campus police are not going to search your room for something they don’t even know is there. All they know is that when an RA was doing their nightly rounds, one room smelled a lot like marijuana. As far as they know, there is nothing left to be found.

I opened the door and the police walked in and started looking around. There was nothing to be seen but that didn’t stop them from being forceful as they did their job. They didn’t mess with my stuff, they didn’t yell or anything, but they let you know that they meant business, and that is something I have to respect. I noticed the head RAs were waiting in the hallway while the door was open. I didn’t look but I am sure there were plenty of hall-mates watching the happenings from the lounge that was only twenty feet away. Without hesitation, and without really thinking about any of the implications, I invited the two RAs into my room. The female RA had here arms crossed as if she were cold. She thanked me; I shut the door, sat on my bed next to my girlfriend, and waited for whatever was to come to do so.

The cops continued to look around, but whatever they were looking for was obviously not there — at least not in plain sight — so they gave up. “We both obviously know what happened here,” the one cop said to me. I nodded. “So there is no reason to fool around.” He asked me if my girlfriend was with me, and I said that she had just arrived only moments ago. I told him that I was by myself. I don’t think anyone could believe me or my story, that I was smoking a joint by myself in my dorm room, a room that included a second person, but there was nothing he could really do about it. He was in a dorm room that smelled like marijuana. There was no smoke (well, maybe a little, but it was getting drawn out the window as we dealt with this inconvenience), and there certainly was no fire. He told me the drill: that I was going to be written up, that I would have to face disciplinary action that would most likely include some kind of probation, and if I were to be caught again, it would be much worse the next time.

The cop asked me a couple more times if I had been with anyone else. He obviously wanted a larger call sheet, maybe in order to fill a quota, but probably not (this was college, for Christ’s sake). I did not take the bait. Maybe my punishment would have been more lenient, maybe not. I decided to take the fall, it was my room and there was no reason to name anyone who was not there, and I had already made an effort to protect my girlfriend. I thanked the officers and the RAs as they left the room, and the evening ended without incident.

A week or two later the phone started ringing, and the answering machine filled up. For some reason I thought I could simply avoid my duty to serve any punishment. When I finally did return the call, the woman told me to schedule an appointment with Options, the university’s substance abuse program. I decided not to. I was barely past my bout with mononucleosis, and I could not imagine the worst that could happen.

The worst occurred over winter break. I was sitting in the family room of my parents’ house when I heard yelling coming from the kitchen. It was my mother. She had just read in a letter that I was suspended from school. She instantly started threatening to send me to the local public school — the University at Buffalo — which wouldn’t be too bad if it hadn’t meant living at home. I made up a tale about getting caught drinking beer (seemed to be a reasonable storyline), and it took, but it wasn’t for a few days before things would return to normal. In order to lift my suspension I needed to schedule my Options appointment, and that didn’t take long.

I arrived at campus the second semester with a new purpose. I was no longer in the dorm, but instead on the South Campus in a two-story, two-bedroom apartment with my best pal Joe. If nothing else, smoking marijuana became a lot easier. Joe was convinced that the one-year probation was levied because I didn’t take anyone down with me. He was grateful that I stood my ground and took the fall, and I am sure he would have done the same. It was common decency.

My first interview with Dr. Melfi was the most uncomfortable. Not because of the subject matter, but because of my gamble. She asked me if I knew why I was there (in the Options program). Of course I did, it was an easy enough question, but I didn’t think she knew the story. I imagined she had simply received a list of names of people that needed “treatment,” and it was her job to get any details from the patient. So I told her that I was caught drinking beer. Simple enough; it was plausible, and most likely that was why anyone was in this program.

“It says here that you were caught smoking marijuana in your dorm.” Eep. I immediately went into fallback mode: play ignorant. “Oh yea,” I said in a drawn out fashion. I insisted that it was so long ago that I didn’t even remember the event (you know, the event that included cops in my dorm room, a suspension and probation, and a series of appointments in a substance abuse program). She probably didn’t buy it, but that didn’t matter. At least we were past the ugliness, and in the meantime, did I tell you that the therapist was a 24 or 25 year old Dr. Melfi? What a way to break up a Tuesday afternoon in snowy Syracuse.

Over the next several weeks I met with Dr. Melfi, and we talked about marijuana, alcohol and other drugs. The most interesting outcome of the sessions was that Dr. Melfi actually encouraged me to drink more. I remember telling her about the party we had thrown for my nineteenth birthday (on the Friday before Spring Break), the keg we had purchased, and the people that showed up. As far as I could tell, she was genuinely interested in what I was telling her, although the purpose of the program was evident: to stress that I had options.

Early on, she had decided that I did not have a drug (or alcohol) problem. When you think about it, the chances of anyone getting caught smoking marijuana in a dorm room are pretty high (no pun attended). She was much more interested in harder drugs and alcohol than my admitted use marijuana. She asked if anyone in my family had substance abuse issues, and I told her what I knew, which wasn’t much. I knew my older sister was a recovering alcoholic, but I had no idea if my uncles drinking beer and whiskey at family parties were a sign of alcoholism. In many ways, drinking is a harmless way to have a good time.

The sessions eventually came to an end, and I wasn’t sure if I had learned anything. If I had been asked, I may have opted to continue the sessions. Dr. Melfi plainly encouraged me to drink more (since I had told her I would usually smoke rather than drink), and that she agreed that I didn’t have an abuse problem (at that time, at least), even though I had told her the truth about how much marijuana I smoked (which was a lot). I did this religiously by the way, especially with doctors. I never understood the value of lying to doctors.

My probation passed without fanfare and I would never get in trouble again at the University. If I had to do it all over again — get caught freshman year — I think I probably would. Talking with a young Dr. Melfi was more than worth it. I would say that I’d never forget it, but I assume that is obvious.

It was early 2003, and I was about to start the second semester of my graduate studies at the top school in the country for my program, the University of California at Berkeley. I was studying geotechnical engineering, and despite the fact that the economy was on the verge of exploding (in a positive way), engineering companies were hesitant in full-scale blanket hiring.

Enrollment in specialty graduate programs come in waves. Typically during economic expansions marked by mass hiring, enrollment is low, and during economic recessions, marked by — at the very least — hiring freezes, enrollment is high. Two years after I graduated with a class of 25 (a relative high for the program historically), the school graduated a class of 8. This year’s class is reportedly in the high twenties, according to my sources (an intern who worked with me this past year). School enrollment, especially voluntary enrollment like in graduate school, is directly related to national and global economic conditions, and it is routinely cyclical. Typically.

Job offers were not easy to come by for my class of twenty-five. When you were able to land an interview, you didn’t tell anyone else, because you were absolutely sure that they wouldn’t be reciprocating the courtesy. It was a fierce battle. Some of my classmates moved from the area chasing jobs. It was also the first time in more than a decade that companies didn’t pour-in through the front doors of the engineering building looking for talent, or that the professors’ phones weren’t off the hook with former colleagues looking for the next rising star, or so this is what our professors told us.

Instead of sorting through multitudes of offers, trading them with classmates like baseball cards, students had to fend for themselves. This led to a stressful last couple of months of school. It was custom for students to have jobs lined up in December, and now lining up a job for June was the most difficult assignment. This also served as a perfect example of free-market capitalism, forcing students to leverage their individual skills and political machinations, and also not to spend too much energy on what may ultimately become a lost opportunity cost.

The invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, but the rumblings concerning the reconstruction, and the jobs that that would require, started much earlier. It was mid-January when I first got wind of the news. I had just returned from Buffalo, which I would not visit again for nearly six years, and my mouth was still sore. I had my wisdom teeth pulled while vacationing at home if only to ensure that the operation was covered by my parents’ insurance.

I was sitting in the computer lounge, surfing the internet for god knows what in the waning days of my final winter break, when a classmate informed that companies were looking to send engineers — hundreds of them — to Iraq to help re-build the country. Bechtel has a long history with the University, and they were one of the premier firms that were gearing up to land in Iraq once the short war was to be declared over. In what was to be the largest reconstruction project in the history of the world, San Francisco-based Bechtel was looking for engineers to send to the Middle East, especially young ones — those without families to care for, those that tend be take a little more risk in personal decision-making. You know, dumb college students. This is where I enter the equation.

The rumored offers were enticing. $200k, tax-free, plus no expenses. Engineers would work, eat and sleep on a campus built by Bechtel (and presumably protected by the U.S. Army, although at that time, this wasn’t a concern since the U.S. would be welcomed with open arms as an occupying force). The deal was to work for two years and return home with $400k in your bank account. I seriously considered this offer. How could any sane person not?

My memories of this potential offer to work in Iraq came rushing back while reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. In his memoir, John Perkins labels large engineering and construction firms as a guiding force behind the corporate push for global empire (for the exclusive benefit of the United States). On more than one occasion, he specifically mentions Bechtel, although Bechtel was not the only engineering firm looking for debt-ridden engineering students to send and re-build the Middle East.

The offer was not for me. At the time, I doubted by decision to not pursue it further — at least set-up an interview — since it seemed to be the perfect answer to pile-up some cash. I had a pretty girlfriend that I wanted to keep. I really enjoyed living in California and didn’t want to leave. And yes, I was scared. Eating in a mess hall with other young engineers would have been fun, but forgoing common sense that this assignment would be in a war-torn country, surrounded by known (and unknown) enemies of the state — of the country that I represent — would have been illogical.

I played it safe instead, and took a job locally. It wasn’t the six figures that an Iraq field-trip promised, but I left school with the highest starting salary in my class, and that wasn’t anything to look upon with regret.

Iraq was an option, and not all options are equal. I could have had a unique once-in-a-lifetime experience. I could have been a foreign contractor with a bulls-eye on my back. I could have come home with a pile of cash and an appetite for land. I could have come home in a body-bag. I believe I made the right decision.

Bechtel is still hiring; the opportunity is always there.

I have found that there are two ways to improve one’s writing, or blogging. These methods are neither groundbreaking nor long-held secrets. They may in fact be widely published. I don’t know, and I try not to waste my time figuring these details out. I just know that these two have helped me to write better, although maybe that is not saying much.

I have written on this blog for over five years, and I have a difficult time reading what I wrote two or three years ago, let alone almost six. Over the past five-plus years I believe my writing has improved, maybe not in content or persuasive opinion, but in style, or at least I’d like to think so. And I believe the following two reasons are why.

Writing. It seems silly, but it is true. You must write to improve. Duh, right? But it is more than that. You cannot just think about writing, talk about writing, imagine that you are writing. You simply must write, and write often.

I’ve met many people who have told me they’d love to blog because they have so much to write about. Most people never do, but of those that do start blogging, it is not uncommon for their writing to suck. (For clear examples of sucky writing, see my 2004 archives.) Fledgling bloggers realize this and most stop blogging altogether, the absolute worst decision they could make (if they did, in fact, want to blog). The “sudden” quitting is usually chalked-up to poor readership or little ad revenue (who are they kidding?), but the real reason is much more clear: their writing plain sucked, and they didn’t know what to do about it, so they quit.

The solution to this conundrum that the incipient bloggers failed to see was that they needed to write more, that their sucky writing was only temporary (unless they truly sucked at writing). They need to continue writing awful until their writing is not awful, just unpleasant. And they must continue writing unpleasant until their writing is not unpleasant, just mediocre. And so forth. It is the only way to improve.

Besides maybe Harper Lee, every blogger or writer needs time to evolve into something someone would be willing to read. It is no surprise that Harper Lee never did publish again after the surprise success of To Kill A Mockingbird. She peaked way too soon, and there was nowhere for her writing to go or for her writing to take her. She thought that she simply could not improve. But Lee is an anomaly; very few bloggers are Harper Lee. The analogy would be to have your first blog-post trumpeted as a marvel on kottke.org or Daring Fireball or by Seth Godin. What would you do as an encore? Retire on top would be the easiest answer.

Reading. This is a little less intuitive, but just as basic, and in my opinion, much more critical for improving one’s writing. You must read. Endlessly. This is the only way for a blogger to learn how to write better. There are countless writers, all with individual styles, and any writer can learn from these styles, albeit most often subconsciously (which makes it so convenient).

One thing that I have noticed is that my writing is directly related to the material I am reading at the time, not in subject manner, but in tone and style, and I’ve made note of it when I’ve noticed. It is nearly impossible to avoid this phenomenon if you write often (or daily, as I do). And this is not a bad thing. There is so much to learn from reading (how to handle sentence and paragraph structure, dialogue, tense and person, just to name a few), and it is ignorant to believe otherwise. Unless you’re Harper Lee.

If you asked 500 people to write the same exact thing — an account of making a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich — the result would be 500 different stories, without a doubt. The subject would be the same, but the tone, style and substance would alter significantly from writer to writer. And that is an important aspect to understand. There are other ways to write, and the only way to discover these infinite writing styles is by reading.

Reading also provides the only proven method of expanding one’s lexicon. Searching thesaurus.com to replace a word here and there simply doesn’t cut it. Discovering a new word or phrase in context, placed and used effortlessly, is the best way to adopt that language and be able to use it as your own. Try as you might, memorizing words will never get you there.

There you have it, my guide to blogging better (and lasting longer). I guess it is quite simple when all is said and done. Read and write, that is all there is to it. No excuses.