Friday, October 5, 2007

I've Got to Admit it's Getting Better

In an unwelcome turn, my favorite Mexican lunch place has stopped playing Mexican covers of Creedence and is instead playing crappy easy-listening covers of the Police. How Mexican is that, for fuck's sake?

So anyway, I had to get out of there after I finished my tacos, and now I'm stuck in a coffee shop trying to hammer out the three sentence dissertation abstract for the front page of my CV. Here's how the work goes. I work on a single sentence for half an hour, and then I e-mail it to my supervisor, the Professor. Then the Professor e-mails me back to tell me it blows and to start over. Then I start over. I work on the same sentence for another half hour and e-mail it to the Professor. He e-mails me back to say it blows less, but still blows, so I need to start over. Etc.

I've been working on the same sentence for about five hours now. But it is starting to blow less.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can i help? Just take a look at these examples:http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~phildept/dissertations.html

and here: http://web.mit.edu/philos/www/dissertation.html

scroll to the bottom of the MIT page and you will see numerous examples. choose a model and follow it.

also see Chap. 11 of The Academic Job Search Handbook and Cracking the Academia Nut

Sisyphus said...

ick. Last year they told me to put a 50 word or so blurb on the CV and I just couldn't do it --- I can't sum it up that quick.

Thanks for reminding me of something else I need to do!

Anonymous said...

j) Dissertation abstract—on one or two sheets of paper give a detailed description of the arguments of the dissertation. Provide a summary paragraph and long paragraphs on each chapter. [NOTE: if you can't easily provide this abstract then you are definitely not ready to go on the market.]

The APA Proceedings from February 2005 suggestions on one's dissertation abstract on job CVs.

I assume that is different from the advice you've been given?

Anonymous said...

I have been told 5-6 lines on your CV.

Even given the relative length of CVs (versus resumes), a 1-2 page abstract sounds absurd. I was told to include something that length in my research statement, though.

Pseudonymous Grad Student said...

Yeah, I get these sense there isn't a lot of consistency about abstracts on CVs in philosophy. PGOAT's getting told to make her way longer than I got told to make mine. I've got a tiny little short one on the CV, and then a longer one as its own part of the whole package.

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't it be nice if entire dissertations were written this way--with the final product being less than a page long? But it would almost always be that perfect one page philosophical haiku. Writing two hundred pages no one outside your committee will ever read is, I believe, bullshit. (And mine was, like, almost 400 pages long.)