MIT Career Development Handbook [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

MIT Career Development Handbook [pdf]

gecd.mit.edu

338 pointspagade24 comments

As the author of the bestselling books on Amazon for both Interviews and Resumes, I’m pretty impressed. Few university career guidelines are presented as readably and attractively as this one. It avoids the trap of suggesting “active verbs” and instead suggests a quite effective list of “action verbs.” And the summary of the differences between CV and resume are the best I’ve ever seen.

A really terrific job by MIT Career Development.

My works on the topics as reference: https://www.amazon.com/Ladders-2018-Resume-Guide-Practices-e...

https://www.amazon.com/Ladders-2018-Interviews-Guide-Questio...

As a casual lurker of a cool website news.ycombinator.com, please stop shilling

The links are relevant, posting them is not a repeated pattern, and mcenedella has been a good HN contributor for many years. Therefore his comment was just fine.

Thanks. I thought the facts were relevant to the comments, and that students wondering if this were good advice, would benefit from the reference. I’ve been contributing here eight years so I know moderators and community would flag anything actually self promoting.

Self-promotion only becomes a problem here when it's repetitive, and especially if the thing being promoted is out of context. Otherwise it can fairly be described as sharing one's own relevant work—obviously a good and on-topic thing for Hacker News!

What's the difference between 'active verbs' and 'action verbs'?

Edit: Sorry I should have read further down - page 31

Being attached to the MIT brand makes finding a job a lot easier, regardless of how your resume is formatted.

Nice, but I probably need a career-repair handbook :)

At least you have a repair option. It's too late for me - I'm retired. ;)

"Zen and the art of career maintenance"

The "Skill Inventory" on page 9 is in itself an eye opener. I wish I had it (and pages 10, 11) when I was starting my career.

The interviewing section starting on page 60 is also great. It's not long on technical interview tips, but gives good lists of common general interview and behaviorial interview questions, plus a good list of questions to ask employers. Running through these in a mock interview or recording yourself would be nice practice and should help with the soft skills portion of any interview. I'd think it'll especially help getting through the HR recruiter gatekeeper. Of course since this is a general handbook for all possible careers you may want to customize to your industry if you're running a practice session.

Busniess idea: mock phone/video interviews as a service

The guys behind Hacker-rank tried something similar in India. Students would pay to practise interviews with someone from the company they were applying to. Their challenge was that the difference between what they had to pay an Amazon/Google engineer for their time and what a student could afford was too small to be profitable.

They ended up pivoting to giving the students free access to coding challenges, and changing _the companies_ for a platform to conduct their technical interviews.

[1] https://m.soundcloud.com/ycombinator/66-breaking-down-hacker...

Interviewing.io already does this and although you are paired with random people it works very well to practice

I can't tell if it's a recruiting agency disguised as a service or really for the benefit of job seekers. They advertise that 60% of their candidates make it to an on-site.

Either way though, very cool and exactly what I was thinking, so thanks for sharing.

> Busniess idea: mock phone/video interviews as a service

https://interviewing.io/ exists

I used this extensively when I was a student (MIT '07). I sort of assumed all schools did something like this. I still reference the action verbs (page 31) when updating my resume.

Opening this handbook, looking at the first pages, it's full of advertisements. How could you trust this handbook to be objective enough to assist you in forging your educational path?!

Our society is run by advertisements; google gets revenue from it, facebook as well, instagram, youtube, you name it. Big companies will always invest large sums of money in marketing, as well as governments and even small companies - the spectrum of people willing to spend money in advertisement was, is, and will ever be, very large.

I think I understand why the two ads are there, Siemens and iBoss would like MIT students to consider applying for employment, but how would this invalidate the information in the handbook? The contents of the handbook look pretty objective to me.

Isn't the presence of the two ads in the handbook a bit like University placement offices allowing employers to recruit from the University campus? University career fairs have all sorts of employers on campus promoting their companies as places to work.

Ads don't mean something is no longer objective. If they were putting forward information about the companies advertising in the material, then sure, but that isn't the case here

How about career orientation? Is there a comparably good resource for people who don't know what they would like to do?

Unfortunately, the structure of American universities seem to celebrate all fields of study equally. While I find the opportunities to learn about so many different areas quite fantastic, I'm afraid that young students aren't given enough guidance in avoiding choices that will lead to large debts for little gain once they graduate.

https://80000hours.org/

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