Work Activities section — enter each job, or a whole career?

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How should my web dev career go in the work activites section?

  • A separate entry for each job

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Just list your work for the one or two firms you liked the best

    Votes: 1 50.0%
  • Put it all in one entry

    Votes: 1 50.0%
  • Something else

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    2

binko

At home I want you to call me Dr. Marvin.
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For years I've had a career in web development. I worked at some agencies, did some contract work, and currently freelance. I don't want to use up 5 or 6 slots on the work activities section on the details of this career that I'm hoping to leave to pursue medicine, but it also doesn't seem to make sense to enter them all in one. Who would I put as the contact person? The organization name?

Does anyone else have this issue? What was your solution?

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I'd combine similar gigs. If your responsibilities changed, you could turn it into 2 or 3 spots, but if it's all the same, keep it together. Choose one where you worked closely with someone, and who will say good things if they are contacted. You should let the person know what the description is, so they can confirm all of the info. (If there's a recent one, where you gave them a resume, that might be a good option.)
 
iirc there are 15 boxes for activities. my 20 year engineering career went in one. no reviewer is really going to care about details - were you employed, did you advance, did you produce, did you have responsibilities. use numbers ("supervised team of 75") instead of leaving it up to the reviewer to interpret ("led Ruby on Rails production team").

engineering-like work that i did as a volunteer and/or in a clinical/research context went in separate boxes.

i made sure i had plenty to put in the other boxes that gave me legitimacy as a candidate, such as clinical, lab, teaching experiences etc.

you need to be kind to the reviewer. your app is in a pile. make it efficient & easy for the reviewer to put you in the yes pile. activities are reviewed like a checklist; prioritize accordingly.

best of luck to you.
 
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That makes sense. Who did you use as a contact? What did you list as the organization?
 
i think i put my last boss and last org, and just minimally namedropped the orgs that anybody would have heard of.

nobody is going to call your contacts unless you're suspected of fraud or other mischief.
 
One last question - will it look weird if I don't list my career as one of my "most meaningful"? It was a big chunk of my life and I learned a lot and in then end what really counts is the friends I made along the way yadda yadda... but the only bearing it has on my desire to pursue medicine is to confirm for me that I *don't* like working in the tech industry very much.
 
My advice is to make your narrative easy to digest, in a pile of 21 year old bio majors who are very proud of their club memberships and don't understand why gaming doesn't count as an EC and did a week of voluntourism in Mexico. Your substance-filled mature app should serve as a nice refreshing break for your reviewers. The meaningful tag should add to the digestibility of your app by substantiating your motivation to practice medicine and your character. Assume you'll be asked why it was meaningful either in a 2ry question or in an interview. Get really ass-kickingly good at succinctly explaining in writing why you should get picked vs. a clean slate.

Nobody is going to be confused that you're leaving your prior career because you don't want to be doing it any more. Assume nothing about what your reviewers understand about web dev, the gig economy etc. Don't make them have to care.

BTW none of this matters unless you have great stats. Nobody's reading your ECs if you aren't in the game academically.

Best of luck to you.
 
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