Career Building Workshop – Global Resumes

Event: Career Building Workshop – Global Resumes

Date: February 6, 2020, at Hagerty Hall

The Career Building Workshop at Hagerty Hall presented by Stephanie Ford was very much like the East Asian Language Skills and Global Competencies workshop I attended in the past. The workshop focused instead on language majors and how to communicate language and intercultural competencies through a resume and instead was a more general workshop pertaining to resumes. The presentation allowed us to learn how to communicate relevant skills as well as tips for polishing resumes to become more professionally acceptable for people seeking employment in a global environment. One thing that really stuck out to me from the presentation was the information on how to touch upon various types of skills that employers in our future target jobs would screen for. They broke down skills into three categories, specialized, adaptive, and career readiness competencies. Specialized skills are essentially “tools of the trade,” and relate to a general knowledge of industry regulations. Adaptive skills are those that pertain to self-management skills and personal traits, such as being energetic, diplomatic, and/or flexible. Career readiness competencies relate to the skills needed to succeed in most work environments, like leadership, teamwork, and problem-solving.

A major resource that was pointed out in the workshop was a database called GoinGlobal, which features country-specific resumes. This relates to international affairs in a major way, especially for those who are wanting to work in foreign countries and need help formatting their resumes to fit the professional standards of said country. I think this will be an incredibly useful resource for me in the future as I work towards my degree in Korean and future career goals in Korea and other countries.

 

Internment: Now and Then

Date: November 18, 2019

Event: Internment: Now and Then (Non-IA/Campus Event)

Internment: Now and then was an event sponsored through the Center for Ethnic Studies. The discussion began by giving a brief history of internment and what exactly internment is, as well as connections into today’s current state of affairs. Describing internment using the words “exclusionary and marginalizing,” I learned a lot about Japanese internment between the years of 1942-1945 that to be quite honest, I had not previously known about. One thing that was pointed out was the constant changing of descriptors referring to internment camps back in the day. By not explicitly calling these camps internment camps and shifting between calling it an “assembly center,” a “relocation center,” “isolation center,” “temporary camp,” or “Department of Justice camps” instead of what it really was, a concentration camp kept liability off Americans by making these camps seem like less of an injustice than they really were. I think this is important as it relates to international affairs today because the United States is a nation built on exclusionary policies and then blatantly “forgetting,” as if a loss of historical memory means you haven’t committed certain acts.  The “family detention centers” that we have today are very much related to Japanese internment camps of World War 2. Even recently,  the United States’ has planned to house migrant children at Fort Sill, which was formerly the site of a Japanese internment camp. This repetition of history that we see in global affairs is not new, nor is it refined only to migrants. Learning more about such a significant event that occurred in the US’ past further allowed me to make connections between what’s happened before and what’s happening now. Being able to make these connections is wildly important to be aware of in our current political climate.