jrjones9933 wrote:
I feel funny about doing things to get my achievements noticed. Sometimes I find it easier than others, but just thinking about mailing out graduation announcements in a couple of years makes me anxious. I hate writing a short autobiography, too. I know that I should just write one and save it as a text file, but I resist getting started.
Does anyone else have trouble with this? Anyone have strategies for elegant, graceful self-promotion?
You do not have to do the graduation announcements; I did not.
As for self promotion, I think it depends on what you do. A friend who did a journalism degree at Columbia University in New York told me that it was stressed repeatedly in her programme that as writers, the students need to put their work out in public, e.g. through a blog, or podcast for those who focus on broadcast work. I think a personal homepage can be good if you move away from the internet 1.0 personal sites which were tacky and, frankly, too personal. Conceive of the site more as a living CV where you can elaborate on ideas, introduce yourself, and showcase any visual or audio media.
Self promotion can be elegant without being boastful, but for that end it needs to also be meaningful. For example, instead of sending the graduation announcements to newspapers and friends of the family the usual way with an arguably tacky picture and a mention of class rank or other honours, contact your local paper about writing a short op-ed about the graduation experience whereby you will manage to announce your accomplishment in a way which will attract attention not to your looks or your honours, but to your words and insights.
Just some ideas...
Short autobiographies are awful, and so are covering letters for job applications. I had a nerdy stats friend in college who surveyed his friends, family, teachers, etc. with a questionnaire from which he made a data set and a bunch of stats analyses to describe his personality. He used some graph of it together with a two-paragraph commentary for a covering letter, and it turned out very well for him. That said, I am not sure it would have been acceptable for more conservative organisations.
29 Apr 2014, 8:16 am
