No Strings Attached

Posted By Kathleen David on May 2, 2007

Recently a friend of mine who teaches ethics, among other subjects, at a local college had to grade the final papers for her class. They have really good web skills and do check for papers off the Internet. This year they had a couple of doozies in the pile including someone who cribbed their paper off of one that the dean of one of the departments had on the website of the college itself and another individual who took part of Machiavelli’s the Prince in Italian and ran it through a translator then slightly cleaned up the grammar if that. This is in an ethics class.

Recently a dean at MIT had to resign when she finally told the administration that she had falsified parts of her resume including degrees she did not earn. Interestingly this dean was one that was very critical of the pressure put on students to build impressive resumes. Considering how hard high school students work to have the right kind of credits and activities to get into the college of their choice, this does not surprise me. From the time we are young we are told that we need to do this or that so we can get ahead. Well many of us, I was fortunate to have two parents who did not live through me or my achievements so the pressure to build up my college admission form was not really there. I did stuff on my own that did look good on my application but these were things of my choosing and I didn’t have to pad it at all to have a decent amount of stuff both for my undergraduate and graduate applications.

It is easy these days to check out what is on ones resume or application. I never really thought about padding my resume because that would be wrong. Sure I have a lot of cool stuff on my resume but each I got based on the items I had previously on my resume. My stage management and puppetry resumes also reflect my career and I would never add stuff to them that I could not prove. I know people do it all the time and for many it is no big deal but I can’t do it. For me it is just wrong.

I have been on the hiring side of the table and dropped a person into the “no” pile due to false information on their resume. I think my personal favorite was the claim to have worked on a show that I stage managed so you would think that I would have remember working with you for 3 months. I would not only call the references given, I would see if they had worked on anything that I know one of my buddies worked on and get in touch with them too. People don’t seem to remember that the theatrical community in a town is rather small all things considered and we do talk to each other.

There is this mentality of getting ahead and darn the consequences that is prevalent in America. Sort of a left over from the “greed is good” era of the 80s and early 90s. For many it seems that lying or as they call it “stretching the truth a bit” is the norm. You only get looked at with a harsh light when you are caught out but getting caught seems to be happening more and more leading to resignations, firings for cause, and flunking out of school. Which really looks good on your resume.

I am grateful I have always been honest on my resume.

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