Resumé 2.0

Click for PDF

Is your resumé boring?

When I was a confused postgraduate researcher (if there's any other kind), I applied for a job in marketing and product development. The company asked for a pitch, rather than a straight curriculum vitae. I made something up in Adobe's Illustrator drawing tool, with some product development ideas (shower gel you could shave with, IIRC), and got an interview. After that, I made slightly weird CVs for a few other jobs, including ones at the British Antarctic Survey and EnCana (see image, right). Nowadays I tend to think that if I can't get a job with a weird CV, then it's not the sort of job I want.

Recently I have started just giving people my LinkedIn profile, which contains most of the information you'd usually put on a resumé. 

I have also looked at VisualCV, an online resumé tool, but never actually taken the time to try it. I'm not convinced it lets you be as creative as you might want to be. 

If you need more inspiration, check out this list of efforts. Most of them are for what are sometimes called 'creative' jobs like graphic design, but I would argue that geology and geophysics are creative jobs too!

I don't know how much I really need a resumé any more, but I've enjoyed maintaining this geological timetable since 2005; click to download the PDF. [Click here for 2016 version, now with fewer typos!]

Update

on 2010-12-21 11:35 by Matt Hall

LinkedIn just added a resumé builder to their Labs... Click here to try it out. It seems to work quite nicely, though the output is quite conservative, and I've run into a couple of bugs. Worth a look.

3 ways to be Agile*

Building on last week's post, I think that not only the principles of agile development could apply to subsurface science, I think some of the tactics employed might also benefit us geoscientists. For example:

Ship and iterate: get maps, sections, velocity models, even geomodels, made early. Don’t wait until everything is perfect (it never will be). Making these things will help reveal the weaknesses in the data and the uncertainties interpretation, and you can be more strategic about what you spend time on. Do everything you can to make the iteration faster (use macros, write scripts, outsource).

Daily scrums: subsurface teams get together on a daily basis, for no more than 10 or 15 minutes. Everyone gives their two or three headlines, quick things are dealt with, other things are flagged for follow-up. And everyone can get on with their day... no more 1 hour meetings!

Pair interpretation: seismic interpreters sit together to interpret, with one picking the lines and looking at waveform character, the other taking a wide-angle view, looking for consistency, nearby well ties, or thinking about the geological setting. Slower, probably, but maybe better (in programming, this technique produces fewer bugs).