On Thursday, November 2, I attended  a career workshop at the STARR Career Development center on writing not only resumes but winning resumes. The purpose of a resume is to provide a summary of skills, education, and relevant experience. It has to have enough information so that it  will secure an interview for you. Although, I already have a resume, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to fix and perfect it.

The workshop was very informative. The instructor taught us the correct format to use when writing resumes and mistakes that are easily made. If the resume is not even in the right format or looks even a little off, the company will not even take the time to look at it, it will go straight to the trash can.  The four most important components of a resume are your contact information, education, experience, and your skills. There are certain fonts, size, and colors. It should be black and white and a more professional font such as Times New Roman. When writing about your education and experience, it should be in chronological order. You should also be using action verbs such as collaborated or prioritize. We also learned about how to write the description of a job in bullet points and to make sure it was descriptive. Also, that you do not really need an objective.

Overall, the workshop was extremely informative and helpful. Although, I only went because I had to, I am glad that I did because it helped me to figure out what needed to be changed on my resume.  When I fix my resume, I will definitely be taking it into the STARR  Career Development center to make sure everything is just right by making any edits and corrections that are necessary. If there is another resume writing workshop in the future, I highly recommend my peers to attending it.

Today I attended an event held by the Baruch Muslim Student Association during club hours.       Joining a student organization presents many opportunities to learn more about yourself, your goals, and your strengths. You can learn from how other students handle certain situations and test your current knowledge. You can also find out what you’re good at, whether that’s multitasking, staying organized, generating ideas, or serving others. This self-awareness will be beneficial in your future career. You’ll also learn how to engage with diverse groups of people.        The event was a spiritual one about the importance of prayer and meditation. It was a really informative and refreshing event because in our current materialistic and fast paced society that we are a part of today we tend to forget the importance of spirituality and connecting with our faith or souls. There was also some tasty food and great company. It was a great event and was a great way to relieve stress after my exams and assignments that I have had in the last few days. 

Your resume is your first impression. A first impression is very important as it determines how interested the employer will be or  taking into account their consideration to invest their time into you.  On September 14th, I went to the career workshop where they talked about resume building and they taught me why i was so important. Having a good resume has the sole purpose of convincing the employer in a matter of seconds that you are unique and should be interviewed. Thus creating the importance of  taking the time to put in effort into your essay. First off when writing your resume your first most highlighted points of the resume must be your best achievements, your best skills, and your credibility and background, but NOT A DETAILED essay about your life. It is very important to keep the same format and keep everything consistent including the grammar, and the spelling. Make sure that all the information you write down is LEGIT, as if the employer catches you that could cost you a big job opportunity. One of the biggest things in a resume is having a cover letter.  During the presentation they mentioned that a cover letter is huge in getting the interest and attention of the employer. A cover letter is the first part of the impression where it is a one page statement that shows the SKILLS that would benefit in a particular interest in a particular field/position and it will propel your chances of getting it, so its good to start out with the skills you think fit the job so the employer sees value, and how good of an employer you will be and your the perfect match for them, and the position youre applying for. Before printing out your resume they stressed that it was very important to have multiple people proof read your resume to catch any errors either with grammar or spelling or even the little things such as MARGINS and consistency, this one little mistake can cost your essay to be thrown out immediately. Overall this workshop was very informative and id recommend to everyone!

On October 10 I went to a writing workshop. I was a  little late but I barely missed anything. I went with a couple friends, to hopefully make it more bearable. But I was pleasantly surprised, it was very bearable. The class was fairly empty, it was my friends and 3 other people. The teacher was very nice and she was very good at teaching her subject. She was an English teacher teaching a workshop on topic sentences of essays. First, we were given model sentences and we were told to examine the sentences and told to write the topic sentence functions. Obviously, i was a bit clueless but after a couple, I started getting a hang of it. After sharing around the class a bit we moved on to the next sheet which was a example of an essay. The essay was about a story called “A Hanging” by George Orwell. George Orwell’s story had to do with how people treat other people like savages. The essay that was written was masterfully written and we tried to analyze every piece of it. At first, we looked at it in base value. Then we pulled out some highlighters and we got to work. We had to split up the highlighters into 3 different colors. Pink was the color we used to analyze figurative language. The blue was used to find contrasting points in the story. And the Green was used to highlight the way the story made the reader feel. I had a lot of trouble with this, but it wasn’t anything crazy hard. finally, we started to link all the paragraphs between eachother. We found linking sentences and found common themes amongst each essay. In general, I learned a lot about essay writing. The class ended with what we took away from the class. I took away how to effectively write an essay topic question. In general, it was a good experience.WORKSHOP CLASS ROOM

I chose to attend this academic workshop for three reasons. Number one, because it was required for the homework. Number two because it was available during one of the rare blocks of free time that I have during the week. Number three, it just so happened that I had an essay due the next day and thought it would be at least a little helpful. When I arrived at the writing center I took my seat along with maybe eight or nine other people. The majority of them were older than me anyway and, as I naturally prefer not to draw much attention to myself, I chose to stay in a corner.  them The instructor handed out packets and using the examples they contained, walked us all through the basics of a good Thesis statement. I honestly had learned most of what she said before, but one thing she mentioned that I had never thought of before was the importance of the verbs you choose in your introduction and thesis. She also explained the difference between an explanatory and an argumentative thesis and the different effects they can have on your essay depending on the angle you are arguing. We went on to view different example statements and were asked to analyze them and improve them. I surprised even myself during the exercise by speaking up and actually answering some questions which I try not to do in most situations. However, the fact that I sometimes enjoy writing and tend to be decent at it may have influenced that decision. It also helped that half of the people there had chosen to leave in the middle of it so I only had to open my mouth in front of four people. Overall I did not really like or dislike the experience. The instructor did not use any sort of presentation and there was no banner anywhere in the room. Half of the attendees left at the halfway mark and the rest scurried away the second it was over so I decided that a selfie of me in basically a classroom would not serve as very good proof that I was there. Therefore I have opted for a screenshot of the confirmation e-mail.

Today, I went to visit Baruch’s writing workshop on the 8th floor of the Newman Vertical Campus. To even be admitted into the workshop, you had to have scheduled an appointment prior to attending. At 12:30 PM, the workshop began with a teacher entering the room. Surprisingly, not that many students had attended, only about 8 or 9 students total attended the workshop. After all of our introductions, we moved onto the workshop’s main topic for the day, which was topic sentences for an essay. Our teacher began by writing an opening paragraph onto the board, which we had to analyze. We were initially given a page that contained a few example topic sentences to examine, analyze, and explain. After learning and demonstrating the process of writing, reading, and understanding topic sentences, we went on to analyze an essay written about a George Orwell story called “A Hanging”, which is about a man who is in prison that will soon be hung for unknown reasons. The essay written about it demonstrates the use of topic sentences, with each paragraph stating a part of a reason for why Orwell wrote a story about inhumane prison keepers while noting Orwell himself does not seem to disallow or argue against it, but is seemingly for the idea of cruel punishment and execution. We had to analyze the essay’s use of topic sentence and some of the distinctions used in those topic sentences, such as personification, and invocation of reader sympathy or empathy. Our teacher had given us a great amount of help on the subject matters and because of a small meeting size, we could have individual meetings and conversations. She came around to check on how we were doing frequently to make sure we understood the subject, and allowed for a great atmosphere overall. The workshop itself was very informative and I may go again one day to improve my writing skills.