Career fair is coming around next week, so everyone is in a frenzy about this new year of job-hunting season that is upon us. By chance, I met some international students from China last week, one of whom is here for a one-year Masters program. So essentially, less than a month after she’s been at MIT/Boston/the US, she needs to look for a job. That’s about as hard as it gets. American students have a hard enough time figuring out all of the resume/interview/networking/company presentation/online submissions/selling yourself/etc. etc. She’s supposed to do all of this after having been in the U.S. for less than a month.

At the same time, I stopped feeling THAT sorry for her after our TWO-hour marathon session yesterday in which I sat down with her to help her improve her resume (she asked me if I would do this with her last week). It was a frustrating experience for both of us, I think. I felt a lot of resistance on her end toward what I had to say; she was quite unwilling to let go of her pre-conceived notions of what a resume should look like or how to conduct a job search in America. Because of that, I think she thought I was a fraud.

I don’t claim to be the best resume writer in the world; I’m sure my own resume could use tons of help. At the same time, I did go through this whole process about two years ago; I had a decently successful resume/coverletter that got me the interviews, and ultimately the job offers, from top consulting firms and banks. I’m not just pulling this stuff out of my ass when I tell her to make bullet points and to include the title of the Intel exhibit she got ridiculous recognition for. Not to even MENTION that I really was doing her an enormous favor by sitting down with her for TWO HOURS; I don’t even sit down with good friends for 30 minutes these days for coffee because of how protective I have gotten of my time these past few weeks (and will continue to be for the next month or so).

I didn’t want to dangle that in her face that I was going extremely out of my way to help her; if anything, I initially played everything down, “oh, don’t worry; I’m happy to help you.” But even just out of common courtesy (two hours is a long time no matter how busy/unbusy people are), the least she could have done was to respect the suggestions I offered her and to listen to what I had to say.

Maybe my problem was that I was too ambitious in what I wanted to do with her resume. She told me that she wanted to interview for consulting jobs, so I went nuts in helping her to restructure her resume for consulting: highlight activities; highlight leadership; bullet-point and quantify your accomplishments, blah blah blah. Thinking back, I think that was just too much; I don’t think I left a very good impression because most of what I had to say was asking her to change her resume. Taking in so much critique, no matter how constructive I tried to make it, was probably hard. If I were to evaluate her original resume on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being phenomenal, 5 being about average, 1 being very very bad), I would say her resume started out at around a 2.5. I was trying to use that and take her to a 10, but maybe both of our times would have been better spent had I aimed for more around a 6.

I also feel badly because I don’t think she will get any interviews from consulting firms submitting the resume that she has. Since she is an international student in a one-year Masters program, I don’t know what she’s going to do when she doesn’t find a job.