Find your passion & enjoy your life!

I know how stressful life can be. I'm sharing this opinion piece from the University of Kansas with you to help you understand why we all need to write our own stories. 

Murnan: Résumé building discourages sincerity By: Gabrielle Murnan | @GabrielleKansan |
Posted: Sunday, January 18, 2015 5:48 pm

Men and women in their early twenties love to talk about their wild Saturday nights, binge-watching addictions and scrupulous résumé building. Résumés have become a thing of casual conversation and to have a perfect résumé has become stuff of dreams. In our society, the perfect résumé equals the perfect job, which equals the perfect life. In order to accomplish perfection, we must first build up on job experiences, volunteer hours, internships, and special skills. But what we should realize is that our résumé is just a piece of paper. A résumé is a representation and a fraud, and I’ll give you two reasons why.

First, completing finely selected activities that pack a lot of punch in 100 characters encourages service and participation for all of the wrong reasons. When people say things like, “I love working with underprivileged children and it looks good on my résumé, too” what I really hear is, “I do things because I know that it looks good, not because it’s the right thing to do.” Résumé building has made it acceptable for a person to participate in an activity solely for the perception and reputation it builds, not for any sort of benevolent intent. Our activities, internships and jobs should be motivated by sincerity rather than falsehoods.

Second, résumé building leaves no time for passion building. While we are off pursuing random extracurriculars, our real dreams and passions are waiting for realization. We spend all of our time building résumés with cookie cutter activities, but we forget about what makes us tick. We forget about what makes us happy and what really drives us. If we forget what motivates us, then we forget our purpose. No employer, colleague, and certainly no friend, desires a person who focuses on the surface, so why should our actions focus on a piece of paper?

Clothes-pinned to an old lamp in my living room is a quote from writer Allen Saunders. In plain, block letters it reads, “Life is what happens while we are making other plans.” Life is also what happens when you are out building your résumé. It’s time to stop caring how our lives and goals look on paper and open ourselves up to the realness of living with purpose.

Forget the résumé and resume your life.

Gabrielle Murnan is a junior from Pittsburg, KS studying environmental studies and political science