Hunting for a New Job?

One of my several innovations this semester in the Applied Statistics course is the incorporation of a significant writing component.  The statistics faculty has long complained about students producing ghastly, unreadable project reports, but they seem to treat it as some sort of natural phenomenon, like the weather.  Since Applied Statistics is the first upper-division statistics course required of statistics, actuarial science, and mathematics majors, the department chair and I decided this was the ideal place to start teaching scientific writing.  Hence, the significant writing component.

The driver for adding this, this semester, is a campus-wide initiative in writing across the curriculum, supported by our Writing Program, which has the clout of a large department at UTSA.  The support is more than just handouts and lip service:  I actually have a W.P. faculty member assigned to serve as the Writing Consultant to my course to help me design assignments and course materials.  He’s even going to give some short lectures!  (He and I both subscribe to the Conspiracy Theory of Bad Scientific Writing: students in the sciences and engineering consciously avoid enrolling in any courses with obvious writing requirements.)

This is all background to the first writing assignment, coming up 31 January:  write a resume and cover letter for an application to a summer internship with the U.S. Census Bureau (there are such things, available to my students).  Sure,  it’s not statistical presentation, but it’s a good warm-up to get the students writing.  After all, they can’t claim they don’t know the subject!

Here are two videos I’m going to make available to my students to help them along:  resume writing and the cover letter.  Thanks to James Hudnall for pointing them out.

Update (7 February).  Read about "short attention spaniels" and Cover Letters From Hell in the Killian Advertisting Newsletter.  Tip from Joanne Jacobs.

Update (14 May).  One of my students landed the internship!  I think I deserve at least a B.