First workshop and livestream as Dr. Write-Aid went well!! In collaboration with the UCSD University Church Chinese Christian Fellowship (UCCCF), I hosted the Engaging Cover Letters and Resumes workshop on February 6, 2025 and live-streamed it on my Instagram @drwriteaid!
My cover letters and resumes workshop has been refined over and over again, from when I worked as a Graduate Writing Consultant at the UCSD Teaching and Learning Commons. However, this is the first time that I feel 100% creative freedom in designing and facilitating the materials. It makes a big difference doing this workshop representing myself, as opposed to representing my school and my office. Most importantly, I can focus on doing this work without worrying about my dissertation! Because I’m DONE!!
Greatest joy is that now I don’t have to rush prepping a workshop while also writing my dissertation, teaching, and so on. I really do like to design, prep, plan, facilitate, and wrap up the aftermath of a workshop, but it does take a lot of time and energy. I always want to design a highly interactive workshop that centers the needs of the audience. To that purpose, I talk with organizers to design the topic, do some research on the topic, arrange scheduling, plan the administrative aspects, coordinate food and equipment logistics, and incorporate discussion exercises and practice reading/writing exercises to make the workshop as interactive as possible. Anyways, I really enjoy this planning and preparation process, and I like being creative to design an interesting workshop with a pretty slide design and smooth animations.
In academia, I’ve heard faculty and graduate students emphasize having “boring” slides for presentations. But in more interactive, casual settings with diverse (younger) audience members, I find changing the aesthetics of the slides to be something more stylish, colorful, personal, and genuine to the presenter makes for a more engaging presentation. The visual look of the slides, combined with the communication style of the presentation (how you use your voice and tone in speaking), is audience-dependent.
Almost everything I learned about doing workshops and presentations I learned from teaching, talking with a few faculty mentors, and doing writing workshops, not from my graduate courses. From my experience and talking with other grads, I think there are few opportunities for graduate students to learn how to do presentations in general; not just the formal, academic-style presentations, but also doing the casual, engaging presentations for non-academic audiences.
I’m also really happy to have been able to collaborate with the UCCCF student organization and put together a workshop that helps all the students work on their summer internships and job applications right now. I really enjoyed our discussion around cultural differences in job applications – we talked about how in some countries, applications don’t entail a cover letter. Applicants fill out a resume form and submit. That was my experience in Japan as well, as there is a standard format for resumes that you follow and some short answer responses that you can just provide, in lieu of a formal cover letter. I also had to mail out some of my job applications and handwrite them too. After my job hunting experience in Japan, I swore I would never complain about job applications ever again.
I also enjoyed talking about why networking is so important for the job search process. I’ve done versions of this workshop at least three times, and I always incorporate a sample job description that I wrote to hire my own undergraduate research apprentices. I also ask my former research assistant students for permission to show their resume and cover letter that they used to apply for the position, with their identifying details redacted. While prepping this practice exercise, I realized again that there is much insider information behind the job description. For example, during the workshop we discussed how the sample job description is written by different people with different interests, and it can be hard to parse out exactly what the job does in the organization. One reason why networking is so important is because talking with experts in different industries helps you learn more about the jobs you may be interested in and helps you decide what to write in your resume and cover letters.
This workshop is also the first time I’ve ever done an Instagram Live! Initially I was resistant to doing a livestream because I wasn’t sure the room would be set up well and felt it would be too difficult. But folks reached out to me asking if they would be able to attend virtually, and so that’s how we decided to do the Instagram Live! I’m really surprised that other people joined the live and watched us. Thank you Instagram participants!
In reflecting on what I’d like to improve on in the future, I think spending a bit more time on the practice exercise might be helpful. Sometimes I feel like participants are shy in speaking about their opinions in a workshop setting, so I’d like to take the time in the future to make sure folks are able to read carefully the sample job description, resume, and cover letter, and we have a fuller discussion of these materials.
Overall I’m really happy with the workshop and I’m very grateful for my collaborators. We all worked hard to pull it off and honestly the most surprising reward of it all was learning how to do Instagram Live and getting people to watch us on the stream. I really like this workshop that I’ve built for discussing cover letters and resumes and the overall job search process. I hope I get another chance to do it again – maybe I’ll end up doing another Instagram Live too!
I’ve shared workshop slides to participants and sent an invite to my Open Air Group Space – every Friday 11:30am – 12:30pm PST on Zoom. It’s a group space for writing, working, asking questions, quick chats, or just hanging out for a bit. The group space is invite-only for consultation clients and workshop/retreat participants only. I’ll make a blog post announcement on this later 😁
Thank you again to everyone who came to the workshop and joined the Instagram Live!!
Thanks for reading!!
Dr. Write-Aid 
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