College Magazine: Welcome to Rejected Resumes

Are you worried your resume might cost you that coveted internship? College Magazine to the rescue! Each week in Rejected Resumes, we show your resumes to the experts so you can get to sleep at night. This week, we’re checking out a College Magazine editor’s resume. Although she got the job, she made a few mistakes we’re hoping to save you from making. Here are some tips that apply to every resume:

 

1. List your most relevant experience first.

Here, the editor's most relevant experience was serving as associate editor on Wooden Teeth literary magazine, which is listed at the end of her activities section.

 

2. List relevant experience and customer service or retail jobs separately.

In this resume, the applicant lists two jobs in the food industry, and all of her relevant experience is filed under Activities. She should have had a section for Relevant Experience that was separate from her other work and her clubs and activities.

 

To read the rest of the first Rejected Resumes post, click here.

This Book's Nowhere Near as Hot as Its Author

A review of James Franco's story collection, Palo Alto, that I wrote for two.one.five magazine.

“Halloween,” the opening story in James Franco’s story collection Palo Alto, is told by a grown-up narrator who, in his sophomore year of high school, kills a woman because he drives drunk. In the end of the story, the narrator says he has since driven down the same street where the incident took place and his remembrance of the poor woman’s death is an afterthought. The narrator’s apathy is disturbing and, yet, it almost means nothing.

The narrator of “Halloween” is not conflicted about this childhood tragedy, and neither is there any conflict in the story. The narrator does mention some tension between him and his girlfriend, who he is driving to confront when the mystery woman is hit, but largely, the story slips through the reader’s mind with no great friction to make it stick. “Halloween” reads like a memory put to paper with the intention of writing the real story at some later date.

While Franco’s narrator is clearly years past his adolescent misdeed, his language is not. The composition of his sentences, most of which are loaded down with helping verbs, is sophomoric and fragmentary. The cadence of Franco’s words is abrupt, halting, jarring, and it feels, not like it was a conscious decision made by the writer, but more like simply bad writing. Too many of his sentences read like this: “His professor father had a great liquor cabinet.” Many of the adjectives are vague like “great” and “horrible.” Then there’s Franco’s line: “Ed was half Korean and half white because his mother was Korean and his dad was white from Gary, Indiana.” How perceptive.

The story is weighed down by a lot of unnecessary exposition – like when he writes paragraphs about Ed and Ed’s family while Ed has very little, at all, to do with the story. There are several pages spent on the dynamics of the narrator’s friendships while there are about two sentences that inform the reader that the narrator was on probation when he ran the librarian over. There is no explanation of why and it doesn’t really seem to play into the story – it’s a fairly tangential (at least in practice) revelation. If this story were written by a regular Joe, critics would deride these sequences as throat-clearing and suggest that the writer attend a few more classes at Columbia before publishing again.

In fact, were Franco not a celebrated actor, it’s hard to believe he would have gotten a book deal. The second story in Franco’s collection, “Lockheed,” is told in exactly the same voice as “Halloween” although the narrator of the second story is female. Even the best story in the collection, “April in Three Parts,” which is told in three disjointed sections, disappoints, although the third section of the story has great potential on its own.

Buyback program makes textbook buying less risky

BookByte, a new textbook program, guarantees students will get cash back.

With classes starting, students are filling Temple’s bookstore, aiming to rent or buy used and new textbooks. While the green digits on the bookstore’s register may have some students’ eyes bulging, BookByte may have found a solution that will leave students’ wallets heavier.

The Salem, Ore.-based website, which has offered textbooks at a discount since 1999, introduced its “Guaranteed Buyback” program. This program is the first of its kind that ensures the company will buy back its textbooks from students regardless of their condition.

“Textbook rental programs typically charge students significant fees for late, damaged or lost books. In addition to the low upfront price typically found with rental, with ‘Guaranteed Buyback’ students also receive a cash rebate when they return the book to Bookbyte,” Andres Montgomery, the company’s chief strategy officer, said.

To read the rest of this article for The Temple News, click here.

Speakeasy with Tim Whitaker of Mighty Writers

Tim Whitaker, the former editor-in-chief of Philadelphia Weekly, is now the Executive Director of Mighty Writers, a nonprofit based in South Philly that offers workshops and an afterschool program with the aim of improving writing skills in students between the ages of 5 and 17. Whitaker, who wrote droll political and social commentary for his Letters from the Editor at PW, is now sending out entertaining updates on Mighty Writers while surreptitiously seeking donations. We met up with Whitaker before a beef and beer at the Pen & Pencil Club, a fundraiser for the organization he started in association with Rachel Loeper, and we talked about what he’s learned about the world of writing and his favorite reads.

Your program has to teach many different styles of writing, no?
The biggest thing is to teach them to write with clarity. They can layer on the style later.

You've been a professional journalist for many years.  Have you ever tried your hand at fiction?
Over the years, I wrote a column for PW about a couple that was a serial. But I never published anything else.

What advice would you give to an aspiring journalist in this day and age?
Besides 'Get out of the business'? We have a lot of tutors who want to be writers and I tell them to give it up unless they absolutely can't picture doing anything else. If it would virtually kill you not to be a writer, then you'll probably make it out okay. It's bleak, though a lot of interesting things are bubbling up.

To read the rest of the interview, check out two.one.five magazine's website.

In My Book: Where you come from is part of who you are

Columnist Rosella Eleanor LaFevre explores ideas of self discovery in Anna Fields’ book “Confessions of a Rebel Debutante.” 

The summer before high school, I had to read three books, one of which was Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” It became one of my favorites, not only because it had been the longest book I had read at the time, but because I felt a connection to the character Jo March.

Since that summer, my favorite books have tended to be the ones with characters I could relate to, especially books about female characters who are as strong-willed and rebellious as March was.

Recently, I had the pleasure to read Anna Fields’ “Confessions of a Rebel Debutante,” which will appear in paperback this February. Fields’ memoir is about a chubby white kid with dreams of being Scarlett O’Hara who grew into a full-fledged rebel debutante living among Yankees.

For Fields’ sophomore year of high school, she transferred from public school to a single-sex boarding school called Wellingham – a place of tradition where girls had various lessons on ladylike behavior and tradition rules.

The high school I attended, Philadelphia High School for Girls, is the only single-sex public school in Philadelphia. I chose it because it was a place where tradition ruled. Like Fields, I believed I could learn better without boys to distract me.

I was mostly right.

To read the rest of this, the first installment of my column "In My Book" for The Temple News, click here.

Stash This in Your Quilted Chanel 2.55

A review of Cecily von Ziegesar's I Will Always Love You, the final book in the Gossip Girl series, that I wrote for two.one.five magazine.

The final installment in the long-running Gossip Girl series, I Will Always Love You, which features the original cast, is a seriously fun, guilty pleasure read. All the things that readers of the series love are here in this nearly 400-page tome: the shameless label dropping, the sarcastic one-liners, the hook-ups, the ill-timed and ill-advised behavior of Manhattan’s young elite. The book is a fast-paced romp that chronicles the failed romances and friendships of New York’s privileged youth as they navigate the choppy waters of winter breaks spent at home. Blair and Serena are at it again, and over Nate, just like always. Dan and Vanessa are finally together and for good – or so Dan thinks until he finds her in bed with her half-naked T.A. And Jenny is M.I.A. until the last two parts of the book, when she gives Blair and Serena a run for their money with Nate. The real reason this book is a must-read, however, is for the author’s orchestration of language. Von Ziegesar is a master of words. True, the poems she has Dan pen are pretty awful, but her one-line interjections in regular narration and the way she plays with words in general are pleasing to read. It is her way with words what sets von Ziegesar’s series apart from all of the other young adult novels and makes it one that adults will enjoy as well. These are actually literary treasures while other writers, even such YA mainstays as Judy Blume, use too many helping verbs and poorly placed fragments. Instead of telling us how characters feel and leaving us to decide whether we believe it, von Ziegesar makes us feel along with the characters – whether it’s anger at Vanessa for being so foolish or disappointment in Nate for smoking weed and drinking until he can’t remember who he is. Absolutely a must have for those of you who love the TV show or the series.

A little rock for your coffee table?

A review of Or Glory: 21st Century Rockers, a coffee table book, that I wrote for two.one.five magazine.

The people photographer Horst A. Friedrichs captured for the book Or Glory: 21st Century Rockers are not just defined by the music that started the rocker movement in the 1950s but also by their tattoos and reverence for retro clothes and hair styling practices. The book, released by Prestel Publishing, one of the world’s foremost publishers of illustrated books, opens with an interview with two Rock ‘n’ Roll DJs, Cosmic Keith and Sean Peschiera. This interview reveals the simplest history of Rock ‘n’ Roll music possible and there are many names that the average reader’s never heard. More eye opening are the narratives on rocker history from Mark Wilsmore, owner of Ace Café London, and Derek Harris, of Lewis Leathers. Wilsmore talks of the invention of credit giving a young generation the ability to buy fast vehicles (in 1950s England, this meant motorcycles) and thus a roadside entertainment culture was born. Harris refers to his company’s history as an outfitter for aviators and motorists and the company’s segue into motorcycle gear with the invention of the Bronx jacket, which young Englishmen rapidly feasting on pictures of Marlon Brando in The Wild One snapped up. And so you have the beginnings of this still relevant subculture. Friedrichs pictures of tattooed men and women with slicked back and pin-curled hair wearing leather everything and riding traditional English bikes are all striking and a good number of them haunt the viewer long after they’ve closed the hardbound volume. They are pictures to look at again and again. The only thing that’s missing is an explanation of the “59” insignias (this insignia means the wearer is a member of the 59 motorcycle club) and the phrase “Ton Up” (which got its meaning in the early days of motorcycling when going above 100 miles per hour was a great achievement). Or Glory is definitely one for your collection of coffee table books.