Pug’s Place

I took in my resume this morning to get my Speaking and Writing for Engineers professor to look at the formatting and ask for advice on where to put my clearance information. He looked at it and stayed noncommittal on the formatting, since he had just said a few minutes earlier he wanted all of the resumes to fit his generic format. However, he did tell me to remove mention of my IB diploma from High School since everyone has one or an equivalent, and suggested I get rid of the whole “security clearance” section.

“It looks odd,” and “I’ve never seen one before, and that’s a sign.” Hello, Kommandant Greer; perhaps you never had an applicant who had a Department of Defense background before? Most college students don’t. So he told me to take it off.

This annoyed me a lot. I’m proud of that section on my resume, and I’ve been told by more people than him that this means a lot to many employers - it means the government thinks I’m trustworthy. That’s good, right? Well, it so happens that yesterday and today the Career Showcase is going on here at UF. Hundreds of companies pack into the O’Connell Center and showcase their stuff and look for talent. Everyone puts on their best, darkest suit and goes into the O-Dome to shake hands and hand out resumes.

There were defense contractors there.

So, I did what any ticked off college student would do when his work was slandered by a teacher. I pulled on a sweater over my jeans, printed a couple copies of my resume, and went over. James told me that they’d read the resume and try to recruit me. I laughed at him.

I got some funny looks from the check-in people, since I was so casually dressed. Hehe. I went off in search of Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, etc. I found Lockheed’s people first, and they weren’t too busy, so I waited to talk to one of them. I explained my question and this morning’s conversation with my teacher to Matt, from Lockheed. Matt began to tell me that around Lockheed they usually put clearance status at the bottom of the resume, or the lower right hand corner. However, Matt was interrupted by Jim, to his right. Jim said, “Matt, you don’t even have a clearance!” Then he turned to me and told me, “Don’t listen to him.”

After catching Jim up on what parts of the introductory story he missed, he gave me the following advice: “If you can figure out a way to make the font for your clearances section blink on paper, DO IT.” I told him OLEDs are too expensive for me at the moment, so it’ll have to go off placement - was my placement alright? He liked it, told me my teacher was an idiot, and suggested a few changes: I should change “United States Government” to “U.S. Department of Defense” and specify that my clearance is currently active. We chatted a bit about my work with TEAS on Eglin, and then he asked me, “So, did you just want to ask about the resume, or did you want to talk about a job as well?” I told him I was actually quite happy working with Sverdrup, but in the event that Lockheed wanted to make me a counter-offer, he could have a copy of my resume. He took it, looked at it for a few seconds as is proper etiquette, and told me, “We don’t tell people this, but I’m going to put this in the ‘Interview’ stack.”

I came back, opened the door to the apartment and shouted, “YOU SUCK, JAMES!” Though it wasn’t exactly being recruited.

Anyway, the security clearances section of my resume is staying put.