Curriculum Vitae: A Reflection of Character

did you know: i included this blog in my resume for some reason

 As of typing this very article, I am on the starting stages of applying to college. I have planned to apply for multiple colleges in the Philippines, planning to take up basically anything interesting that keeps me within the Humanities and Social Sciences. However, there is one thing that most colleges that I plan to apply to have in common. Some of them require me to ask for a recommendation from my teachers or guidance counselor; therefore, I need to provide them with my Curriculum Vitae (CV).

When I first heard of those two Latin words, I had a very slim idea on what it meant. Curriculum means "Course" and Vitae means "Life". Put the two together and what a CV basically means is a "Course of your Life". For the Freedom English Speakers out there, it's basically your resume. The basic purpose of having a CV on hand when applying for a new job or getting yourself into a good college is that it provides a lot of information that your potential employer or university dean can use to gain more knowledge of who you are as a person, your education and work history, hobbies, interests achievements, awards, objectives, and goals. It's like a very complicated version of a persons social media bio.

A CV is basically a reflection of who you are as a person. If we are going in terms of modern games, it's basically the stats, abilities, and proficiencies you have and built up for yourselves over the years. It shows how qualified you are to be accepted into particular lines of work and schools. It is your first ever impression to a university or employer. Teachers and work references need to see your CV so that they can have more information about you when recommending you to your next job or university. At a students' teenage years, they should ideally be thought how to write a CV, especially during their senior year of high school, that would be particularly ideal as many would either be having their first job or applying to colleges. Unfortunately, CV Writing is just something that schools assume a person can learn themselves via the power of the internet. It doesn't make sense to me that schools who have the incentive to help students get to college, career planning sessions, and life advice stuff don't teach the fundamentals of growing up and being an adult. That small annoyance brings me back to the song "Don't Stay in School" by Boyinaband which is basically about the reality that schools mostly teach things that would be deemed practically useless in the long run over practical real world skills like financial management, voters education, comprehensive health and sex education, and CV writing. 

At the first glace, it sounds like an easy document to make. I cannot really blame you for thinking that, I had the same thought as well, but when you actually get into the business of doing it you do realize how much harder listing down as many noteworthy things  about yourself can be. It's absolutely daunting when you look at your short one-paged CV and see another person with a significantly larger one depicting how much more they have done than you, or the information you have put on your CV is not interesting and doesn't standout compared to literally anyone else. It is such a basic document when thinking of it in face value, but actually doing it is extremely intimidating when you do not have many interesting things going on in your life that can be added to your CV.

There are many guides, apps, and templates online that gave you a basic gist of what an ideal CV should look like. It should be colorful, exciting, unique, and all that fluff. There are even AI that are literally tasked with helping you make a CV that is appropriate for a certain career line. It's absolutely insane. And because of the floods of CVs going into offices for job applications, there have been AI in charge of basically scanning your CV and automatically throwing it out because if it doesn't look appealing for their scanners. Some people make various versions of their CV for different employers and schools, while others just create one CV and decide to update that whenever they get into something that is noteworthy to add to a CV.

From my own experience, writing a CV is very difficult because I never really know what the hell to even add in the first place. The main goal of a CV is to make yourself look as much of a appealing and ideal person as possible, and I think most of the choices I made during school have reflected that ideal on me. However, I feel that it is not enough to impress the big boss man who is going to read the fiddly two pages of my very boring and uncreative CV with skills that are most likely useless in the grander scheme of things long term. The Big Man judges me very harshly on how basically useless my skills and past experiences are in a productive workplace. I do not even know how to describe myself in the profile section o the CV and what my objectives actually are since I am surely going to use the same CV when applying for my internships.

The more things you can add to your CV, the better your character will be reflected and seen by people who can take full advantage of your potential. Which is why if you are serious of getting a job or going big on your university of choice, you need to do as many professional noteworthy things as you can. You need to make yourself look like the more ideal candidate for a position or class slot. And there are many ways of adding more fluff to your CV. For me it was doing more extra-curricular activities, like joining organizations and attending events by other schools. For others it is picking up an instrument, grabbing an internship in a family business, or taking as many after school classes and activities as to look very intelligent.

You cannot really cheat out of it. When you become a young adult, you need a CV within your files at all times in case a great opportunity strikes. We live in a very competitive world where people are grinding the hell out of life so that they can get the best stats. We have to compare ourselves against others constantly, and realize the unfortunate truth that many people that we assume are in equal footing with us are actually significantly more ahead than you are. Every step you take needs to be a very careful one because it can make or break the great potential of adding something significant to your CV. 

It is a very lucky thing to note that your hobbies also give you a very small push in writing your CV, as they can provide a plethora of relevant skills depending on what those hobbies are. For example, I have included the fact that I write articles on this blog and dungeon master D&D games in the hobbies list in my CV. Originally I wanted to make a separate section since The Bears Den and my D&D world are very relevant side projects along with my YouTube channel and twitch stream. But I decided against it and just placed it under hobbies because I do not have a very strong commitment to most of those things anyway... and also because I never streamed on twitch for the past months and never uploaded anything good on the YouTube channel so I opted to not add those to the CV. Those two things did  give me better skills in video editing, directing, and being an entertainer, which are traits that can be added into your CV.

All in all, a CV is a big step into becoming an adult, and Adulting is very hard, but we all have to go through it at some point even if we don't want to. I think I'm just frustrated of how a few pages of paper can hold so much value and importance over your whole career depending on what you put in it, and it basically shows your value as an actual person because a CV is such a personal document due to having literally many important stages of your life documented in it. A CV requires you to really reflect into yourself deeply, and think how you want to project yourself to others and how to make your CV reflect that. You have to consider what you wanna do and where you aim to be at in the long run as the decisions you made in the past will surely pave whatever roads you will walk in in the future. Sure your hobbies may suck and your skills may be considered absolutely useless in the productive world, but regardless they are all skills that you posses. Someone ought to find something in you that's useful and be interested in having you as a employee. Hell, skip the working middle man completely and be self employed, be the one reviewing the CVs, and see reflections of character.

good luck to all you college applicants and job seekers!

- YugiBearz