A Very Rough Draft. (Feedback, Please)

My résumé may never land me a high paying job or a prestigious fellowship, but it made a damn good Halloween costume.

I normally don’t really do Halloween; I’ve never been into creative costumes. It was just a means to an end. I loved candy. I loved walking around on the crunchy leaves in the New England dark (a dark which was often cold and rainy, which is why my twin sister and I frequently dressed up as fishermen). As such, costumes were either practical (i.e., foul weather gear and lobster nose) or fantastically simple. It was not that my mom wasn’t creative. When I was a raccoon in the 2^nd grade play (I was always some random animal in the background) my mom made a costume out of black electrical tape and brown corduroys and made a cow costume for my sister cutting holes out of a white t-shirt to layer over a gray sweatsuit. She was not one of those mothers who superglued or stapled the merit badges onto our Girl Scout sashes, but she also was not into sewing or purchasing elaborate costumes. So when we were five, she helped us make our own costumes. We were trees—paper bags with leaves glued on. A few years later we were coneheads, which basically consisted of wearing cones made out of poster board.

But this year, I finally thought of that elusive clever costume. I was right in the middle of a job search, I was painfully aware of how all over the place my résumé was and how many random jobs I’d had. It would make the perfect costume. And best of all it was free (nice, being unemployed and all).

My most recent job was as a captain with Ride the Ducks of Seattle, so I wore my white short-sleeved captain’s shirt (complete with the shoulder bars) and a plastic yellow duck bill quacker around my neck. After duck season slowed down and there weren’t enough hours for all the guides, I had been with the photographers at the Ducks while I looked for another job, so I wore my SharpShooter nametag. A button and a “VOTE” wristband symbolized my three-month stint with WashPIRG running voter registration drives. A brown beanie was all I got to keep from my three weeks with UPS as a seasonal driver helper since they made us return everything with logo, but I taped a UPS label on it. Running around delivering packages last winter gave the motto “What Can Brown Do For You?” a new meaning for me.

Already I was pretty decked out, and this was only the jobs I’d held in the last year. For my summer job for six years I worked at Manchester Marine, a small boatyard in my hometown. To represent the concept of yachting, I wore my preppiest baby blue pants, a whale belt that I actually purchased on Martha’s Vineyard, and a pair of flip-flops. In my shirt pocket, I added a mechanical pencil from the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, where I proofread applied math manuscripts for a year after I got back from backpacking through Europe, and a pen from The Dartmoor School, where I taught English literature for a few months this spring. These were the only two jobs I’d ever I’ve ever held where the attire was office casual.

It was amazing. I was a physical representation of my job experience.

I think it says something to be so versatile. I can drive an amphibious vehicle. I can file. I can think. I think more employers need to see the benefit of an eclectic résumé. I think we should go to interviews as 3D representations of our résumés. Would you hire the guy in a suit or the girl in the funny hat with the duck whistle around her neck? (OK, don’t answer that question.) But think about it. There is a benefit to being versatile. Jack of all trades, master of none. I wanted to use that line. A quack of all trades. But it never came up. No one really seemed to care what iI did when I wasn't driving ducks.

This Halloween I dressed as my résumé. Next year I’m going to wear the same costume and go as a liberal arts grad. We’re all prepared to do whatever we want. Some of us just take a little longer to figure out what that is, gathering some good stories, and a couple of funny hats, along the way.