Post 16: The Handwritten CV

On my last day at university, I submitted the final corrected version of my mini-thesis.

I was done.

Before leaving, I met another friend. He was also a village boy, from Tshikhudini. Let me call him my second friend.

While I had been doing Honours, he had been finishing some outstanding undergraduate modules. Now he was starting his own Honours degree.

He still had another class to attend that day.

I told him:

“I’m done here. This is my last day. I’m leaving.”

His response surprised me.

If I was leaving, he said, he was also quitting.

“We are leaving together.”

I reminded him of the obvious difference.

“Man, I completed my Honours.”

His response was difficult to argue with.

“So what? You are unemployed, and so am I.”

He had watched me struggle financially during Honours. His financial circumstances were not very different from mine, and he did not want to experience the same thing.

He was quitting.

I said fine, but there had to be a plan.

We could not simply return home and add ourselves to the growing number of unemployed graduates.

We needed to do something.

“Like what?”

I suggested that we submit our CVs to the local municipality and ask for any voluntary work related to environmental sciences. Even if it involved waste management, we could start somewhere.

His attitude immediately changed.

“You see, now you are talking. Let’s do this.”

There was one small problem.

I didn’t have my CV with me.

Neither did he.

Today, perhaps the obvious response would be to go somewhere, type the CVs properly, print them and return later.

We didn’t.

We went back to the Honours office.

My friend had much better handwriting than I. He took pages from an A4 booklet and handwrote both our CVs.

Two university graduates then walked into a municipality looking for professional experience, carrying handwritten CVs.

We submitted them.

When we looked at the volunteer list, our names were near the bottom.

Then we went our separate ways.

Looking back, there wasn’t much reason to assume that anything would come from submitting.

But submitting those CVs was one thing we could control.

What happened afterwards was not within our control.

Or at least that is what I thought at the time.

Join the conversation

Would you submit a handwritten CV if that was the only CV you could submit that day, or would you wait until you could present yourself more professionally?