Identifying Positions of Privilege

In a recent class discussion, I called out a classmate for pontificating on women’s issues from a position of privilege. He was arguing that women are never discouraged from studying Computer Science because he had never seen it happen.

To me, privilege is about not thinking about how other people (people without my privilege) see the world. After that class, I started trying to think about what kinds of privilege I have that I am not conscious of (I am pretty conscious of my “white privilege” and “heterosexual privilege“). I tried to think about times every day when I inconvenience people unnecessarily because I assume they are like me in this privilege.

My biggest privilege? Height.

This is not an uncommon privilege, and it is one with measurable benefits: Tall people make $789 more per inch per year, and are 90% more likely to ascend to the CEO chairs of Fortune 500 Companies, according to Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book.” says blogger and entrepreneur Penelope Trunk.

My housemates probably suffer more than anyone else because of this privilege, every time I put at the good tupperware on the top shelf, or the garbage bags on the top right of our deep pantry, or the brown sugar on top of the flour, right at my eye height but signifigantly above the heads of most of my housemates. I work on my bike, assuming they can use it–then remember it is the wrong size. I offer to lend them dresses–but realize formal gowns for my 5′8″ frame will not work for my 5′0″ friend.

The weirdest place when I caught myself exercising this privilege was when we were recently decorating our dining-room with Firefly posters. I wanted to hang them so the focus of the poster was at my eye-height, which is approximately an inch higher than my co-hanger’s heads. We had to negotiate their height so no one would feel hunched or dwarfed over breakfast (low posters feel like low ceilings to me, and high posters make everyone feel like children in our own home).

I feel a responsibility to examine my positions of privilege, because then I will understand how other people enact their privilege, and what I can do about it. For an awesome examination of male privilege, check out Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “If I Were a Man”.

Inspirational Quote:

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1858

10 Tiny Things to Make Your Resume Better (from the perspective of a grant-giver)

I reviewed close to 30 resumes and applications for a program of which I am a member (I’m keeping details obscured for the privacy of the applicants). I am currently sitting, waiting for my next interviewee to show up.

In reading those resumes, I have developed a list of 10 things I will be doing differently for my resume.

1. Change your objective to fit the job! It is quite difficult to remain neutral on (much less become supportive of) an applicants application which stated their objective was to “Gain an Internship in the Financial Sector”. Real people have to read your resumes, make it as easy as possible.
2. Delete “Operating Systems” if all you know is OSX and Vista. I simply do not care. Now, if you run your own home-brewed Linux distro, or even Open Solaris or Red Hat, that tells me something about you. For any job I am going to be applying for, saying I can use the world’s two most popular operating systems should be as irrelevant as saying I speak English clearly. It should be a given.
3. Delete “Relevant Coursework” if it isn’t relevant
4. Make skimming easy. Give me clear headings with short bullets. Keep the font around 12–reading resume after resume is hard on the eyes, and you want to make it easy to like you for a position.
5. Delete “Software” if it isn’t relevant, which it absolutely is not if you are applying for a travel grant. The presence of this section was my litmus-test for determining whether an applicant had bothered to customize her resume for the application. Also, even if you are applying for an internship where the software is relevant, unless you know something more than Microsoft Word and Excel, do not tell me. I don’t care.
6. Don’t say “references availible upon request”. Of course they are.
7. Give me space for notes on your resume. Say I am reading your resume, and I see you worked at Stanford Libraries when you were an undergrad there. I want to write a note to myself–”See if she knows Rachel”–but can’t, because you filled every availible inch of your resume with text. Too bad for you.
8. Keep your fonts simple. Times New Roman in bold, underlined and italics, with 1-3 sizes of font for different headers is fine. Unless you are a confident graphic designer, and sometimes even then, you show more class with simplicity than with decorative typesetting.
9. Use numbers. “Quadrupled the number of client stories on website”, “Managed portfolio of over $100,000 in assets”, “Built social media presence which brought in over $1000 in 3 days, 3 months after internship completed”. These are much more powerful than banal paragraphs about your impact on ROI or contribution to a project. Give me numbers.
10. Include locations of past jobs. Perhaps this is not necessary for all applications, but this is a small way of advertising your network. If you’ve worked in Washington DC, Palo Alto, San Francisco and Pittsburgh PA, your interviewer may know someone in those cities and feel connected to you.

Summary of 10 tiny tips to improve your resume:

Optimize for the job in front of you. Make it scannable. Advertise your network.

Keep up hope!

Inspirational Quote:

“Robert H. Schuller – “Tough times never last, but tough people do.”

3 Tips for Interviewing Effectively

For the past few days, I have been interviewing candidates for a program I am in with a grant associated with it. In those few days, I have learned more about effective interviewing than in all my interviews combined. Here is what I’ve learned:

1. Be prepared with: 1) a 10 second pitch which you are passionate about, 2) a clear narrative about why you want the job/to join the program for which you are applying, 3) 1-3 really insightful questions about the organization/position
2. When interviewing, exude confidence and passion–there is nothing more boring in a day of interviews than someone who looks tired, uncommitted or uninterested (if you are an introvert, like me, try to see the interview as a chance to spread information and learn. It is an exchange, a teaching and a learning moment).
3. Address the questions you are asked seriously, and give solid details and examples. Bland does not sell, neither do generalities. The only candidates who have knocked me off my feet have given me insight into the problems my group works on.

Final tip: tact is always appreciated! No matter how unbiased you interview team is, pointing out a major issues with the organization’s strategy is best done politely. We’re only people, and hurting our feelings cannot help your candidacy.

Inspirational Quote:

“Second, probably the single greatest personal intellectual epiphany I’ve had since leaving academia is that the real world actually has interesting problems: not just problems that you ought to deal with because life as we know it could get pretty screwed up if we don’t, but problems that are actually intellectually engaging, make use of the cognitive muscles you developed in academia, force you to develop new abilities, and expose you to interesting questions you would never have discovered otherwise. The assumption that academia is where people grapple with interesting questions, and the business world is where stupid things happen, is just wrong.”–Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Sometimes Life Demands Haiku

On Tuesday I was sitting in one of my classes and, having used up my self-allotted number of theory fights for that class period, I was bored. Instead of doing my todo list (which has gotten much shorter than last time I posted about it), I wrote haiku all over the professor’s handouts.

This is not to imply that I wasn’t paying attention–I continued to contribute throughout the class, but as soon as the professor had answered my point and moved on in his lecture, I started working on my haikus again. Sometimes, on high energy-low outlet days, I try to find creative outlets rather than get frustrated in class.

Here are my 3 best:

Rushing faster, wheels
thrumming, stuck leaf slip-slapping
quick—brake! Goddamn squirrel.

Procrastinating:
Hoping I’ll work faster if
I’m running scared

Study or read for
pleasure? I must study, but–
Cryptonomicon.

And here are 3 I am still working on:

My teacher’s kid is
sick. “in-shallah.” My dress is
pretty. “in-shallah.”

My hips settle on
the hard practice-room stool. I
plunk a note–joy reigns.

Sugar, milk, butter
& eggs. Mix by hand then add
dry ingredients

Inspirational Quotes:

“I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.”–Nathaniel Hawthorne

Shameless Self-Promotion (but I’m proud of myself!)

A few weeks ago, friends and family caught sight of an article in Carnegie Mellon Today about yours truly’s trip to the Presidential Inauguration last January and authorship of a photo used on the cover of the magazine of the Special Libraries Association. Because Carnegie Mellon Today does not post their old issues until the end of the month, I couldn’t link to that article until now. I’m famous! Yay!

Inspirational Quote:

Robert Cialdini: Taking on too much

Over the stretch of my professional years, I’d say my most nagging error has involved an inability to gauge correctly the point at which the next possible undertaking – or even golden opportunity – should be firmly rejected. Whenever I’ve allowed one-too-many responsibilities onto my plate, everything – including the new item – has suffered from the overcrowding. With that threshold crossed, I’ve no longer had the time or patience to plan, think, or toil hard enough to be proud of the resultant work. If I had a single piece of advice for young researchers, it would be to create and follow a rule for avoiding this state of affairs. The rule could involve something objective (e.g., never exceeding a specific quota of research involvements) or subjective (e.g., avoiding the feeling of rushing to, from, and through all of one’s commitments). The key is to apply the rule ruthlessly. Anything less would be another form of error.

Dr Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, is the most widely cited expert on influence and persuasion alive today. His most recent book is Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways To Be Persuasive.

Opera as Training for Human Rights Advocacy (and at video from last night’s performance!)

I tend to get a certain question–”Opera? How does that fit?”–a lot, particularly when marketing myself to potential employers. I usually explain that singing opera gives me a unique opportunity to get comfortable performing, engage with texts in half a dozen languages, and teaches me about effective management (because if there has ever been an unmanageable group, it is opera singers). But those answers all leave out the most important reason why my opera training helps me be a more effective advocate for human rights: because opera is about human rights.

I’ll use the opera I am in (go here to see the webcast). Dialogues of the Carmelites by Poulenc is about the lives of the nuns who were massacred in 1794 in France near the end of the revolution. More to the point, it is about human rights in a time of revolution.

1. Religious persecution

   In the opera, the Carmelites were a reflective order. As the Mother Superior says: “we are nothing but a house of prayer”. However, because they are perceived by agents of the revolution (a cadre of soldiers in this case) to be representatives of the Pope, they are treated as traitors and publicly stripped )in the final scene of Act 2 (in our version, the soldiers also attempt to steal the sacramental cup). The anti-Catholic actions of the soldiers are put into context by the captain of the guard who tells Mother Marie “In the church at home, I served two years as Sacristan. Our noble priest, I loved him like a brother–but I’ve no choice but to howl with all the wolves”. Whether motivated by fear of the mob or hatred of the church, the soldiers are engaging in religious oppression.

2. State-sponsored violence

   The soldiers are also agents of state-sponsored violence. As representatives of the revolution, they feel empowered to harass and humiliate the nuns. When the nuns are imprisoned, the jailer (also a representative of the revolution) taunts them and accuses them of being in “correspondence with our enemies”, when they were really imprisoned for having mass illegally. Even more tellingly, as the nuns are herded into a government office where they must sign their names to receive “the benefits of liberty” (access to food and housing?), a soldier tells them they will continue to be “under the watchful eye of the law”–as he says this in our production, he leers at Sister Constance (a novice) and stalks her as she rushes to sign her name. The opera shows the evils of power without accountability and how it can become state-sponsored violence.

3. Judicial corruption

   In the opera, the nuns are sentenced to death and executed without a trial by their peers, essentially murdered by committee. Before that, just before they are stripped, they are informed they have been expelled from their home “in the name of the Republic”–that is, an undemocratically elected group who used the church as a symbol of the opulence and aristocracy they hated (in this case, ignoring the willing poverty in which the nuns lived to cast them as agents of the Pope).

4. Violence against women

   While some of the nuns fight back (yours truly tries to take a soldier out when he starts to strip a friend) the opera is a story of men attacking a women’s community. The most peaceful scenes (1.3 where we are all spinning and sewing, 2.2 where we meet the new Mother Superior) are occupied solely by women. The opera makes the case that women can create their own self-sufficient communities which men (with the exception of the priest, who is allied with the women because he is celibate) see as threatening to their power and feel they must use violence to  destroy (whether by banning them as the soldiers do, or trying to force women to leave them, as Blanche’s brother does).

5. Casualties of progress

   The nuns did represent orthodoxy–as a largely sequestered order, they had an allegiance to the monarchical system which had supported them for hundreds of years. The french revolution, for all of its blood and terror, eventually brought about one of our world’s great democratic nations. But good opera, like all good history, does not lend itself to easy categories like good and bad. For me, the joy of opera is the complexity of the picture is presents. In the end, the women in the convent were restricted by their vows to a life I would never choose as a modern woman. But their life is also not one I would deny to a women who chose it freely. As Madame Lidoine reminds us as the sisters await their sentence in prison: “How could they deprive us of liberty, which we so long ago surrendered of our free will?”

Finally, here is our execution scene from last night, via a bootleg (I’m the one of the far right, who walks to the guillotine holding my sister’s hand):

Inspirational Quote:

“The arts is a life of faith, its pure faith.
People preach about faith, who have no idea what faith is.

But artists know. Artists are the lilies of the field that Jesus preached about in the Sermon of the Mount.

‘Consider the Lilies, don’t worry about what you are going to eat or wear. Consider the lilies. They toil not and spin not, and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’

The life of the artist is pure, pure faith.”

September 19, 2009. The News from Lake Wobegone, with Garrison Keillor

My Top Three Picks for Summer Interships in Washington DC (as of 1:44pm, October 18, 2009)

I’m writing from the middle of the internship competition season, part I. Because of long security review periods, I have to apply for federal internships (with the Departments of State or Defense, or the Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service) by Early November 2009. NGOs which work closely with the federal government (or are highly competitive) can also have their summer internship deadlines in November. Part II of internship competition season will start around March and go until April or early May–this is where the smaller, but just as awesome, NGOs will want their applications.

I’ve been keeping my eye open for neat opportunities since this summer, but I’ve really been trolling Idealist (the best place I have found for public interest internships) for a few weeks and here are my top 3 picks (below is a description of how I chose them):

1. Working on the Trafficking in Persons Report for the United States Department of State. This would be my favorite government publication. This has the earliest deadline (November 2nd) but, pending research, it looks like an incredible opportunity.
2. Enhance the online presence (blog, website, forum, Facebook) of the American Islamic Congress. The internship would also involve researching student press, and lots and lots of writing. AIC a group of moderate Muslims who came together after 9/11 to propagate the political views of moderate Muslims. Just like every other group, the tails ends of the bell curve of the American Muslim community dominate our politics discourse–the AIC supports the middle of that curve. From their website, they look like an agile group which actually helps people (see Project Nur, a community of campus advocacy groups AIC supports) where I would get autonomy and have the chance to learn effective advocacy while writing every day. NOTE: AIC has no and promotes no religious views–it represents a religious group’s political views (Less 700 Club, more Episcopal Relief and Development).
3. Writing about the human rights concerns and works of the Advocacy Project, a group which guides citizens left out of the peace conversation in their countries to speak up. They support “peace fellows” who go to countries struggling towards peace and work with advocates there to access tell their narratives, choose good exposition tools, and get funds.

This list will probably shift and flow (and there are tons of amazing internships I haven’t listed here!) but these are my top 3 picks for today.

My non-negotiables:

The organization:

1. Must be deal with transnational issues.
2. It must actually help people, not just do research about them.
3. It must be trying to use new media to spread its message.

The internship:

1. Must involve helping people access information
2. Involve writing (for reports, blogs, press-releases)
3. Must be in the public interest

That’s it for now!

Inspirational Quote:

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Dorothy Parker

Sad, but True

I am a little addicted to Reuters’ Oddly Enough. Weird, human error errata, it is usually a source of slightly educational funny stories. Then, sometimes, it is heartbreaking. This short story about the Gaza Zoo’s attempt to delight its children patrons by painting their donkeys like zebras–”using masking tape and women’s hair dye, applied with a paint-brush”–is, to me, a symbol of how far people in conflict will go to attain normality.

Why did they want zebras?

“The children don’t know [the donkeys aren't zebras] so they call them zebras and they are happy to see something new.”

Why not get real zebras? “

A genuine zebra would have been too expensive to bring into Israel-blockaded Gaza via smuggling tunnels under the border with Egypt, said owner Mohammed Bargouthi. “It would have cost me $40,000 to get a real one.”

Like anything that happens in Gaza, there are two wildly divergent and acerbic narratives to tell about the zoo in Gaza. One is of a community zoo which suffered heavy animal casualties during Israel’s attacks on Gaza (which, of course on the opposite perspective, a in response to Hammas’s attacks into Israel).

It is also the community zoo where Hammas laid booby traps (hat tip to Mere Rhetoric for the link).

Even knowing that the zoo has been the location of offensive fighting on both sides, my heart still aches for the children of Gaza who are so excited to see painted zebras. It’s a sad, troubling conflict, but an especially horrifying one for the children trapped in the middle.

Inspirational Quote:

Paris was then occupied by Nazi soldiers, and it was one of the coldest winters in memory. To people passing the chic bistro, the scene was unthinkable: the city’s social elite sitting down to luxurious suppers when so many were cold and starving.

But a closer look revealed the truth. The waiters brought menus, patrons asked what was especially good that night. Wine was ordered by the bottle; Champagne was shouted for by businessmen in black ties. Ladies complimented one another on their clothes.

But for the duration of the night, all that emerged from the kitchen was water. No food, no wine, no Champagne. Just bottle after bottle of water, on trays, in Champagne buckets, in bowls, and in glasses. It was a night like any other, yet unlike any other.–Modern Love, the New York Times, 2009/06/28

Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Awesome news. Hat tip to Penelope Trunk for her post. This will reset his relationship with Congress, for a while at least. Cool stuff.

Inspirational Quote:

“Edward P. Jones said: “If you write a story today, and you get up tomorrow and start another story, all the expertise that you put into the first story doesn’t transfer over automatically to the second story. You’re always starting at …the bottom of the mountain. So you’re always becoming a writer. You’re never really arriving.” —from today’s Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Heather Kresge’s Facebook status, October 5.

A Problem in Search of a Metaphor

I am considering applying to Carnegie Mellon’s 5th year scholar program. It is full funding (+stipend) for an additional year of study for

“a small number of exceptional students to remain on campus for one full year following the completion of their normal course of study”.

In that year, I would

“pursue a broadened educational experience while continuing to enhance the Carnegie Mellon community [...]“.

Applications aren’t due for a few months, but I am already brain-storming about how I could “enhance the Carnegie Mellon community”; that is, what my 5th year project would be. My current idea is so new to me that I still haven’t come up with a good metaphor for the problem it addresses, but here goes.

–

Problem

Carnegie Mellon is like a series of private gardens, where students, once planted, remain fixed within their walls. This segregation (sometimes called “silo-ing“) has intrinsic value: it gives the inmates of each of those gardens a community with-whom they identify, sometimes exclusively. But in a cross-disciplinary world, it also detracts from the community of communities which is my college.

This sorting into gardens happened months before any of us matriculated, when we were accepted into our schools. We did not build these walls. However, starting in our first week, we added our own bricks to the already impressive edifices with our college cheers:

College of Humanities and Social Sciences (H&SS):

*clap* *clap* *clapclapclap*
“We’re well rounded”
*clap* *clap* *clapclapclap*
“We’re well rounded”

College of Fine Arts (CFA):

“CFA! CFA! We look good every day!”
“CFA! CFA! We look good every day!”

Tepper School of Business (TSB):

“TSB! TSB! Someday you will work for me!”
“TSB! TSB! Someday you will work for me!”

Mellon College of Science (MCS):

“MCS! We’re the Best!
“MCS! We’re the Best”
“We know stuff that matters!”

Bachelor of Science and Arts (BSA):

“Two for one!”
“Two for one!”

Again, these cheers helped build community. But the taunts that make them spicy (“Someday you will work for me!”, “We know stuff that matters!”, “We look good everyday!”) are stereotypes which corrode our community of communities.

Goal

I want to lower the walls of our private gardens. Subject focus is part of what makes us Tartans, but there is nothing in our culture which demands that, once planted, we must not only work but think within the walls of our colleges. I believe that CMU is growing towards a culture of interdisciplinary thinking (a belief buoyed by the 7000+ hits for the word “interdisciplinary” on CMU’s site), but before we can have that culture, we need a narrative about ourselves which supports it. I want to provide that narrative, a tartan mirror, reflecting who we are as a whole, today and now.

A Tartan Mirror

For my senior+ year I would recruit a group of undergraduates who have taken Empirical Research Methods (and so know how to conduct form interviews) and who want to help reshape our community’s narrative. The group would be called Tartan Mirror.

We would conduct hundreds of interviews of CMU students, and ask them about what makes them Tartans. I know we are part of a community, but what does that mean? What are our similarities in thought patterns, aspirations, goals, that we all share? What clubs are popular? What majors? Who do we think we are?

Each day of interviews, we would post a few quotes about what it means to be a Tartan on the project blog, and also document our methods for anyone else who was interested in such a project.

This blog would be the immediate enhancement to CMU.

We would transcribe the recordings and retain the notes from this project, creating a repository of information about who Tartans are right now, in this time and in this place. This would be a resource, a time-capsule, for future scholars to draw from to find out where they came from. This is the long terms enhancement.

The medium term enhancement would be a publication of selected moments of the interviews (selected by the Tartan Mirror staff) in an anthology, similar to This I Believe, which would only be published (with names obscured) 5-years after my senior+ year, so that nearly all undergraduates interviewed would have graduated.

–

This proposal is very tentative. I will probably change the methods, the focus, maybe scrap the whole thing. But I think best in writing, and wanted to put it somewhere. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear. Have a great evening!

Inspirational Quote:

“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” ~Albert Einstein