GEOG/ES&P 330
California Ecosystems
Envisioning Yourself in the Environmental Job Market after Graduation
Résumés and Cover Letters
This lab has several purposes:- to get you to picture yourself in the environmental, planning, or GIS job market as you'll plausibly exist upon graduation (I hope this gets you to identify weaknesses you may just have enough time to patch up before graduation!)
- to develop your proficiency in writing résumés
- to get you in the habit of customizing your résumés for different potential employers
- to emphasize how important it is to know something about the company or agency you're applying to: their problems, their standing in their line of work, how you can fit in and help them with their goals
- to have you write to that knowledge, curating what they are about to read in your résumés
- to inculcate the critical importance of addressing how you meet nearly all of the job requirements they list (and sometimes they include preferences or things they'd like to get but aren't requiring, so, if you meet one of those, say so)
- to give you practice in formal business correspondence and formatting letters and résumés
Deliverables
- two cover letters applying to jobs in two different categories below, each showing clear customization
- two résumés, each customized to support the two different letters of application
- a list ranking the applicants to a third job and commenting on their strengths and weaknesses as part of your duties on the search and screen committee for that third job
Getting Your Job Listings
I pulled out jobs from Indeed.com, an interface you may find useful when you do start hitting the professional, technical, and managerial marketplace upon graduation. I looked for junior positions that required a college degree in geography, environmental science and policy, GIS and planning or similar. Each of these often bleeds into one of the others (e.g. a planning position may depend on GIS or an environmental job is in an urban planning department), but I've tried to come up with clear choices for you. Each of you will "apply" to two jobs from the list below, and each job must come from a different category. So, you might apply to one GIS job and one planning job or maybe one environmental job and one planning job or one environmental job and one GIS job. You cannot apply to two jobs in the same category! The reason I'm requiring this is it is the easiest way to force you to come up with very different letters and two different modifications to your résumés. This is essential when you hit the post-graduation job market for good, so I'm trying to get you in the habit now.- Environmental jobs
- Planning jobs
- GIS jobs
How Do You Write a Résumé?
At this stage in your (imaginary future) career, fresh out of your bachelor's degree, you will want to keep your résumé to one page (later in life, as you acquire more experience, you may move to two page résumés).
Your name and contact information go at the very top. Bolding your name is good: Making it a huge headline makes you look like you have a hungry ego. Your contact information can be fit on a single line right below it and should include your professional e-mail (not gonzogamer4712@gmail.com, where your friends know to get hold of you!). If you don't have a decent one now, get one (most e-mail providers let you create up to five e-mails on one account: jqmartin@gmail.com or jqmartin255@gmail.com). If you have a LinkedIn account (that you have carefully groomed to put your best foot forward), you can put its URL there (employers will probably look for you there anyhow). Related to that grooming, make sure you clean up all your social media: That funny picture/video of you losing your beer over the gunwale of a boat is not something you want up on Google or Instagram or TikTok for strangers to find at this critical juncture!
After your name and contact information, some people like to put a one or two line "objective," "summary," or "profile" statement. Some people counsel against this as it's often superfluous and gimmicky; others recommend them, more the summary or profile, though, than the objective these days. Do a search and learn about the fine shades of difference among these and then decide whether you want one (which one?) for particular jobs.
Fresh out of CSULB, your single greatest job asset is your college degree, so Education should be the very frst thing after your name and contact information (and, arguably, objective/summary/profile). List only your college degrees (B.A. or B.S., possibly A.A. or A.S. from a community college). Depending on the job you're applying for, you might list certificates or minors, too (not required: list them if you think they help you with that particular application). Do NOT list your high school diploma or any colleges you attended without earning a degree.
If you earned any honors, such as magna cum laude or dean's/president's list honors or a high GPA (>3.0), it's okay to mention them. Otherwise, simply mention the achievement of your degree(s).
At this stage, it may be helpful to include a short list of courses you feel are directly relevant to a particular job you're seeking. Change those lists for each type of job you apply for! If you were going for a GIS position, you'd mention any GIS, cartography, remote sensing, or statistics courses. If you were going for an environmental position, you'd mention your environmental geography, biology, or chemistry courses. Keep this down to 3-6 (no more than three bullet statements long, maybe two columns of them, which you can create with the Table function in word processors): short titles or descriptions, rather course numbers. It wouldn't be ES&P or GEOG 330: It would be California ecosystems.
Other skill sets should be included, either up here near education or at the bottom. These can include such things as certifications (GIS Certificate, Certified Master Gardener, Certified Wetland Delineator, CPR Certification, etc.), software proficiencies (either categories, such as GIS or spreadsheets, or brand names, such as ArcGIS or SPSS). Something else that can go in here is language proficiency (such as fluent in Spanish, reading ability in French). Other things may be appropriate here, too, such as event planning.
After your education (with, perhaps courses and skills), put in a section for Professional Experience. If you've had environmental, GIS, or planning positions or internships or volunteer positions, put them here (if you haven't done an internship yet, maybe take one next semester or do some volunteer work). Include a couple of bullet statements about your responsibilities and accomplishments.
Then, toward the bottom now, you can include Other Work Experience. This is where you list the kinds of jobs you relied on to scrape through school: barista work, restaurant work, retail, whatever. A common mistake for fresh graduates is to go on and on about these jobs, with elaborate bullet points under each of these. That is appropriate when you're looking for that kind of work but, presumably, upon graduation, you want to make a qualitative break in your career, which graduation uniquely enables. Even though you take justifiable pride in your work history and any increases in responsibility you earned, now you are trying for something completely different -- technical, professional, or managerial positions -- and jobs normal to college students would detract from that image. So, include your current work history simply to demonstrate you worked through college, but don't go into detail.
Make sure there are NO typos or ungrammatical bits ANYWHERE: These are conspicuous and can be show-stoppers.
It is a good idea to tweak your résumé for every single position you apply for. Most of it will be pretty boiler-plate, but you want to foreground anything that is particularly relevant to the position or employer and you need to accept that this will entail extra work to customize your résumé.
How Do You Write a Cover Letter?
Above all, have the position description and list of duties right in front of you and write from the position description as though it were an outline. They want to know how, exactly, you can satisfy the great majority of these requirements.Your letter needs to be written in formal business correspondence formats. A common one is:
DateFour line breaks
Recruitment contact person (if you can find this)
Company/agency name
Company/agency addressSkip a line
Salutation (Dear Ms./Mr. Martin: or, failing an actual name, Dear sir or madam:)Skip a line
Tell them you are interested in thus-and-such a position with thus-and-such a company/agency and, possibly, where you learned of it. You have to be specific! Point by point, explain how you can meet THEIR needs, and try to provide evidence you can (referring to things in your résumé: This is what I mean by "curating your résumé). A common mistake is to go on and on about yourself and your passions for whatever and never get around to THEIR needs, not yours. Keep this to about a page (or, rarely, max, page and a half)Skip a line
Conclude with a polite sentence or two about your eagerness to work there and thanking the recruiters for their time and consideration.Skip a line
End with "Sincerely,"Skip about four lines to make room for your signature
Give your full formal name (NOTE: For this lab, use your full fake formal name)
Give your address and contact informationSkip two lines
Encl.: résumé
All elements can be left-justified.
There are different styles and formats used, but this is a common and workable one.
Your letter and résumé should be printed on good-quality white or near-white paper: No weird colors.
And, again, ABSOLUTELY NO TYPOS or grammatical/syntactical hiccups. These are really, REALLY conspicuous. If you are unsure, get a super-literate friend to look things over and encourage them to red-pencil the heck out of your drafts!
And, Now, You Are on the Search and Screen Committee!
After you turn in your two résumés and cover letters, I'll put them online here: https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/geog330/applications/ for perusal by the "search committees." That would be each of you! You will be put on the "search committee" for a job NOT in the two categories you applied to. You will read each of the files submitted by one of your peers under a fake name and then you will rank the list and write a brief comment on each applicant's strengths and weaknesses to justify your relative ranking. Your grade on this lab will reflect how many "Likes" you got from the "search committee" amd how fairly you tried to serve on the search committee. This will give you the opportunity, not only to practice applying for jobs, but to see what it's like for the search and screen committees that may well have had to go through dozens and dozens of these files to try to find the best available hire for their companies, agencies, or organizations. Seeing this from the other side of the desk may be eye-opening and give you a lead on how to make yourself more presentable when it really counts.