post-academic

[post-academic]

Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.

[post-academic]

I am forever grateful to an archivist mentor I worked with in grad school for some resume advice she gave me and thought maybe others would also benefit from it.

Keep a Master Resume.

This is not the resume you send out. This is a detailed resume of every job (with dates and location, supervisor and location phone number are a bonus) and as many skills/duties/accomplishments you can possibly think of for each and every one of the jobs and education programs you can think of.

She showed me hers, it was about 25 pages long, and formatted exactly like a regular resume for ease. Every time she would learn a new program/skill, she'd add it. Change in title or duties, add it. Complete something big/special/complicated/new to her/professionally significant, she would add it. This way when she went up for a promotion or raise, she had a detailed record of highlights to pick from to show she deserved it. There was no "when was that? Did I submit that last round of reviews?"

Applying to a new job? Pick and choose items from your Master Resume to plug in to the resume or CV you will be sending based on the job posting. You don't need to rewrite it, just cut and paste relevant details.

[post-academic]

What do you mean you can’t find a job? Have you looked on Indeed? What about Linkedin? You should try Upwork. How about Rise? Have you tried Jobera? Take a look on Dribbble. You GOTTA be on Jooble, dude. Get on Jooble. Jooble has it for you.

[post-academic]

Lil shroomies

[post-academic]

my problem with "it's fine to cheat in classes that you deem unimportant for your career goals" is that a lot of those classes are either designed to teach critical thinking/research skills OR focused on multiculturalism and social justice

basically it's a great way to dumb down education and produce an even less educated population, and also a great way to materially reward doctors and nurses (etc.) who decided that learning about racism was beneath them

[post-academic]

For those who need it 💼🐀✨

[post-academic]

Hey kid you want a job?

Great get online and go to a job board. Indeed, Linkedin whatever. Now you're gonna search for a role that's in your city, fits your qualifications, and doesn't seem like a bad time.

See that easy apply button? Don't hit it they just throw those in the trash. Now you're gonna want to go to the company's website and check their careers page.

Oh? That job doesn't exist anymore. Cool go back to the job board and find another one.

Great you found another job, you're on the company's career page and the job exists!! So you're going to need to make an account on the career page website. They're using Workday, the same site as the last job you applied for? Who cares? You need to make another account for THIS job's workday page.

Now you're going to upload your resume. That'll autopopulate about 15 boxes with everything on your resume, except formatted wrong and with tons of errors. So just go through and painstakingly check the dates on all of that and rewrite everything you already laid out in an aesthetically pleasing format on your resume.

Ok time for the cover letter, explain why this specific job and company are deeply important to you. You love their mission statement and wouldn't even laugh if their ceo was gunned down in the street. You'll really want to reiterate the things you just spent the last 20 minutes filling out on the resume section

(Remember to include language from the job description, people who work in HR are lower than dogs and they need patterns or they get confused.) Write about a page, but hey don't sound too desperate or robotic this is where they judge your character!

Maybe add your portfolio site at the end here, who knows if that helps no one has ever clicked mine haha.

Anywayyy time to hit apply! Congrats! You'll see that confirmation email come in and you should be getting the rejection letter in about 2 weeks. Unfortunately your resume didn't have the right buzzwords and the AI auto rejected you :(

Time to start again and try not to kill yourself!

[post-academic]

“Like, we’re being taught by mainstream culture that getting an English degree is a waste of time, and that thinking about the meaning of stories will not prepare you for life in the world. This, in turn, comes from the assumption that the purpose of a college degree is as a qualification for a middle-class career — rather than a sign that you have learned something that has value in its own right. That you have gained critical thinking skills, of exactly the sort that studying literature would give you. If I were feeling extra snarky, I might point out that critical thinking skills would indeed be a drawback if you’re trying to get a career pumping up the A.I. hype bubble, but never mind.”

— Why the Worst People Are So Keen to Wreck Art and Culture (via wilwheaton)

[post-academic]

[post-academic]

If you want to employ trans people, especially trans women of color, you gotta kill your degree requirements on job postings in favor of experience or OTJ training if the job doesn’t strictly or legally require it.

Per a 2015 study, Access Denied:

-66% of white trans people have a degree, compared to 14% and 15% of Black and Hispanic folks.

-16% of trans people with a degree are unemployed, vs. 47% without.

-compared to cis people, trans people with a degree are five times more likely to be unemployed.

-71% of transmascs have a degree vs. 29% of transfemmes.

-46% of trans people make below $10k/y, with 57% of TWOC making below that.

If you want to actually help trans people, employ us so we can fucking survive. Hire us and train us. Fucking help us live.

[post-academic]

i completely understand & agree with the backlash against students using chatgpt to get degrees but some of you are out here saying "getting a degree in xyz means pulling multiple consecutive all-nighters and writing essays through debilitating migraines and having severe back pain from constantly studying at your desk and chugging energy drinks until you get a kidney stone and waking up wishing you were dead every day, and that's just part of the natural process of learning!!!" and like. umm. i don't think that any of us should have had to endure that either. like maybe the solution for stopping students from using anti-learning software depends on college institutions making the process of learning actually sustainable on the human body & mind rather than a grueling health-destroying soul-crushing endeavor

[post-academic]

I just...I have no words.

To our colleagues who are international students: I am so sorry that you are being used as pawns in this bitchfight. We are so immeasurably enriched by your presence in our country, your dedication, your intelligence. You deserve better than this, and I am so furious on your behalf.

[post-academic]

[post-academic]

No you guys you have to read to the part where they reveal one of the most common reasons the companies are bringing them back:

Toothacre also notes some irony in one of the common reasons companies are bringing back DEI policies. “Thirty-three percent said it was harder to hire diverse talent. What did they think was going to happen when they eliminated all of their DEI initiatives? And so they inadvertently created an environment that said, ‘Hey, we don’t care if you are comfortable here or not,’” she said.

Note that about 75% of all the responding companies say that their policy on DEI initiatives is ultimately driven by the bottom line. Do not ever expect a company to behave like a human person; at their cores, corporations are creatures of pure profit. Exceptions to the norm are typically privately owned rather than publicly traded and even then you're basically at the mercy of the collective judgment of a super rich guy or, worse, family with varying levels of generational insulation from any perspective held by someone who has to work for a living.

Anyway. Back to the article. A solid third of companies that rolled back their DEI initiatives are already bringing them back (33%). 21% of that total are doing it "quietly" by sneaking back the submission forms, changing the language, and hoping no one notices they caved, and 12% are openly admitting they made a mistake (like companies normally do when they alter policy). Of the rest? Only 40% of all companies that destroyed DEI initiatives aren't currently discussing or considering any new DEI investment. The remaining 27% of companies that cut back DEI are in various stages of internal discussion about restoring DEI initiatives.

Y'all, people are pushing back. One third of these DEI coward companies reported collective pushback from employees strong enough that they had to take notice. Two thirds of the total companies experienced noticeable consequences of rolling back DEI investment—and for the most part, these consequences weren't coming from boycotts. (These were least likely to be cited as consequences at 9% of companies reporting, but certainly capable of nailing a company in the profits — ask Target.) but from people doing the hard, uncomfortable, risky feeling work of speaking up at their workplaces, turning down job offers or quitting and saying why, changing jobs or organizing unions or agitating for these roles to come back. Workers, who collectively have much more power within a company than customers, are leading the charge here. Thank you, worker-organizers!

[post-academic]

[post-academic]

Good. Not everyone is throwing their hands up over the AI cheating problem.

[post-academic]

This issue of trust is a huge part of why I have so many feelings about genAI. I've dealt with plagiarists since my first year teaching (I remember my first plagiarist, whom I was so nervous about calling into my shared office. He cried. I comforted him. He redid the assignment.) But a much larger percentage of my students are cheating now. And it's a form of cheating that requires less thought than pasting or paraphrasing from unacknowledged sources. If you don't want to read the whole article, these are the bits that resonate the most with me:

If this is what cheating now looks like, I not only don’t know how I’m supposed to tell if my students are cheating—I don’t even know how I can be sure they wrote the thank-yous that mean so much to me. ChatGPT, in giving my students an alternative to skill-building, hurts their ability to learn, but more than that, it kills the trust that any teaching relationship depends on.

If I feel that my job now requires me to make judgments that are basically impossible... the job of my students has always been likewise impossible. There I am, demanding that they practice the extreme vulnerability of young adults learning in public, asking them to commit themselves to the study of things such as reading and writing that I consider to be living processes, open-ended and unmasterable. And there the surrounding society is—their justifiably anxious and perhaps indebted parents, who want them to be successful and happy; the corporate donors and partners that prestigious schools openly court and who want them to be productive and docile employees. What they want are people who have mastered various discrete and somewhat mechanized sets of skills.

I appreciate the author's compassion, though I don't land in the same "what can we expect but that students will cheat?" place. I believe (I cling to the belief with desperation) that students can be persuaded of the value of developing their own ethics, their own skills, their own voices, their own ability to engage with the world.