Ok so I did a six month full time stint managing a mobile animal farm. Fantastic fun, I learned a ton as I had to learn about a million different animals. I also developed and delivered an education program which is right up my alley - I love teaching kids about animals. I was going to put this on my application but here's the thing. I dont have a referree for this job. It ended badly when I quit after six months of not being paid, which left me in financial ruin and having affected my mental and physical health. Not only will my former employer not give me a good reference but they have been actively slanderous towards me. Will it open a can of worms to include this experience on my application, considering I cant back it up with referee evidence?
Should I include this animal experience on my application or not?
- Thread starter Ausrural
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Sure, why not include it as long as you have at least 3 other good references. I had 2 animal experiences that went VERY bad for me, and both were in my applications. I did manage to find people who would right a positive ref for me for those experiences, but I def didn't include them for the schools that only wanted a few references. The only school you would NEED a reference for every experience is Cornell, so you can't list this experience there, but otherwise it's all good.
It came up in all of my interviews, but I was able to make it work for me rather than against me. I talked about why these orgs sucked, what I had done to try and make it better, and explained at what point I realized that there's not much I could do and moved on responsibly. It always ended up in an in-depth conversation about how many crazies there are out in the animal non-profit world, and having insight about that made me seem much more balanced (since otherwise I look like an animal-lover hippy on paper).
Just be careful about what you say, and don't be negative. You don't want to come off as a complainer or someone that's hard to work with. You should be able to show case what you've learned from a significant experience, even if people issues got in the way.
It came up in all of my interviews, but I was able to make it work for me rather than against me. I talked about why these orgs sucked, what I had done to try and make it better, and explained at what point I realized that there's not much I could do and moved on responsibly. It always ended up in an in-depth conversation about how many crazies there are out in the animal non-profit world, and having insight about that made me seem much more balanced (since otherwise I look like an animal-lover hippy on paper).
Just be careful about what you say, and don't be negative. You don't want to come off as a complainer or someone that's hard to work with. You should be able to show case what you've learned from a significant experience, even if people issues got in the way.
