Overdone Resumes

I recently helped a friend with his resume. I have some experience with this from coordinating the CIS internship program at PCCC, though I am certainly no expert. My resume is about two pages long at this point. I'm certain it could be improved upon, but I basically have only needed it to send in a book proposal to Pearson and to apply to teach part-time at Bergen. Since I am not an active job seeker, I have not done a lot of work on it.

Though I coordinated the internship program, our former internship coordinator was my resume expert, so I sort of learned by watching her edit resumes. When we would work with our students to get their resumes done, I would help them with the basics (list your jobs, what sort of responsibilities did you have, etc), and she would come around and really polish the resumes.

This Career Builder article discusses some of those cliches, and how you can clean some of them up:
Link to article

Of course, if you are an active student, your college probably has a Career Services office that will provide you with free resume help. I'd say that is something to take advantage of, whether you are at Passaic, Bergen, or elsewhere. Otherwise, once you start looking for a job, you will end up bugging a friend or maybe even paying a professional to do it.

Medicine and IT

If you've ever watched the TV show House, you will know that the main character (a doctor) has a rule that you never believe a patient, because "everybody lies". It's a very dark view of the world.

I can relate.

I've had friends ask me to take a look at computers, and while not everyone lies, I do find that many of them do. I imagine for a full-time tech support professional, it is doubly so. For example, if you spilled coffee on the computer, please don't tell me you dropped it. If you dropped it, don't tell me it just stopped working.

Any of my former IT students run in to this?

Big News

So as those of you who read my blog know, I was on leave for the 2010-2011 academic year from PCCC. I am officially back as of today, since today starts the 2011-2012 academic year.

That is not the big news, however.

I told my classes in person last year that one of the things I wanted to do with my year was to work on a manuscript for a textbook. I submitted a sample chapter to a publisher in November, and I hadn't heard anything from them, so I just sort of assumed it wasn't going anywhere. However, I did do some side work for the same publisher, doing some test banks, PowerPoint presentations, and other supplements for some of their textbooks.

I received an email last week from the publisher, wanting to speak with me. They said in effect that I've proven to be an asset with the smaller projects I've worked on, and that they'd like to move me up to a bigger project. The woman who emailed had read my sample chapter, and we've come to terms on a book. Yes, I will be an author!

I'm going to be writing a smaller textbook that they will bundle in upon request from a college. There is a new Office textbook series they are coming out with called "Your Office". I know for their other textbooks, the main Office topics (Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint) are usually sold together as one big textbook (as you see with the 1000 page Go! with Office 2010 text). To allow faculty freedom to teach other topics, they have a series of smaller books they can bundle with it. For example, instead of having a chapter on Windows 7 there, faculty can choose a smaller 96 page Windows 7 book, or get the Windows Vista one instead. If you'd like to additionally teach topics like Internet Explorer, OneNote, Outlook, or one of any number of topics, you can get one of the smaller books bundled in with the main book. My book will be the equivalent for the Your Office series, and the topic is Web 2.0 applications like social networking, blogging, podcasting, and cloud computing. I am still working on finalizing a projected table of contents.

The publisher gave me a link to the marketing materials, and I have to admit, the main series editor and I have a very similar approach to education, and I think this is a great fit for me.