Southerners speak at the same rate as people from anywhere else in the country.*
Southerners’ vowels tend to be longer, but their consonants tend to be shorter.** But since we tend to notice vowels more than consonants, we notice that they’re longer, and so we perceive Southerners’ speech as slower even though it actually isn’t.
*In fact, all humans everywhere speak/sign at the same rate on average, in terms of information density over time. Some languages require more syllables/movements for the same amount of information, but those syllables/movements are temporally shorter overall so that it all evens out.
**Yes, I am simplifying massively here for the sake of presentation. But still, it’s basically correct.
That is sooooo facinating to me since I think Spanish (which I think is the easiest language for me to learn) is spoken so very, very fast. So, I guess I need to speed up my hearing!
When my younger s went to college, he purposely chose a roommate from a very different background. His roommate was from the-middle-of-nowheresville, MS. And yes, he had a southern drawl, but he talked so fast I couldn’t understand 3/4 of what he sad! And I speak fast myself!
I don’t think putting honors college on a resume adds much value, but that’s just my opinion and maybe it depends on the industry…as noted above.
As far as a minor, one of my kids was a biology major and it came with an automatic minor in chemistry due to the overlap in classes. I don’t think that mattered either, although it is on her resume.
She also had a Spanish minor which she liked, but is not what made her fluent in and of itself. Proficiency came with continued exposure and practice which began in middle school and continues to this day. She does include proficiency on her resume.
Phi Beta Kappa has a chapter at her school and she was nominated and attended the ceremony junior year. I never heard of it until she told me and I read up on it- at first I thought it was one of those things you get in the mail, but it isn’t. She doesn’t have it on her resume or LinkedIn, but does list the achievements that led to the nomination.
Phi Beta Kappa is a real thing, highly respected by people who hire, and definitely belongs on the resume. There are some bogus honor societies (a couple where anyone with a B+ average gets “invited and inducted” but PBK is not one of them.
Interestingly that’s the one thing my D wouldn’t put on her resume. She felt that having her GPA/honors/accomplishments was more important than listing Tau Beta Pi (the engineering equivalent honor society) and she was running out of room.
DD often chooses to put PBK and summa cum laude on her resume instead of her GPA due to space constraints. Both of those honors indicate a very high GPA as well as a competitive honor so that’s how she has chosen to show that info.
All in all, it is kind of funny reading all of these students/young adults trying to figure out how to list their honors in the most space efficient and informative ways.
Edited to Add: DD still in academic circles (grad school currently, fellowship last year). I’m sure that also has influenced how she chooses to list info
For the first or second job after college, things like PBK are likely more important (and they don’t take up much space!) than some of the other stuff folks include on a resume.
It’s really not necessary to enumerate that you know DCF if you are a finance major. And “back in the day” listing your expertise with Powerpoint and Word might have been meaningful, but it is now assumed. If you majored in French Literature, and wrote an honors thesis in French on Voltaire’s worldview of something or other- the thesis is great, the topic is great, French fluency is great, but you don’t need two lines of a resume explaining who Voltaire was (I saw this recently…. my team had a good chuckle).
I also saw a resume explaining what econometrics was. Sometimes you have to believe that the “universe” (aka corporate recruiters) know more than you think!
I think applicants need to know the difference between a resume and a curriculum vitae. What I was taught in the stone ages about resumes was that they had to be one sheet of paper. So it could be double-sided, but everything needed to be super solid info (no fluff) if one was using the back side of the paper.
A curriculum vitae, on the other hand, is expected to be lengthier and more detailed with publications and such, but most jobs I’ve come across have always requested a resume, not a c.v.
With people now applying through online apps, they’re adding as many key words as possible to try and pass through automatic screeners and may not be thinking about how the resume itself gets printed off. What one enters in an app and what one does on a resume can often be two different things, and applicants should think about both when they’re looking for a job.
When I was active in hiring at BigLaw and IB, I pretty much trashed anything that was over a page. The exception was for more senior hires where they might have a separate client list or list of notable transactions.
I agree stuff like PBK, Latin honors and other awards/honors given by the university itself were positives.
So this is relevant, as it’s part of the discussion we’ve been having. S22 is in Tau Beta Pi, as well as the honor societies specific to MechE’s (Pi Tau Sigma) and CivE’s (Chi Epsilon). I told him I didn’t think he needed to list all of those, and that there were many more important things that could use the space. He wanted to keep them, as this year he’s in leadership for two of them (not on his resume) and between that and the service requirements, they are basically taking a good chunk of his free time.
We found a middle ground and were able to find enough space to fit them (by condensing the way he talked about his honors in general), but I don’t know that he needs to keep them all.
If he’s in leadership position then I agree with your son to find room on the resume!
Part of my D’s reluctance to include it was that it was during covid and they never did anything as a group in person.
Being in an honors program that one is admitted to on entry mainly functions as an indicator of your high school achievements relative to those of other students at the college. Employers probably have little or no interest in it, even though some employers do look favorably at some colleges over others, even though the college you attend is largely an indicator of your high school achievements and your parents’ financial situation. Honors earned in college probably have a higher chance of getting employer attention for new graduate hiring.
The definition of a minor varies all over the place across colleges in terms of how many courses / credits, how many of them have to be upper level, etc.. A minor that requires 3 lower level courses is a lot different from one that requires 5 upper level courses. So it would not be surprising that an employer may not know what a minor really means, even if it is in a subject that may be relevant to the job being applied to (e.g. CS major with accounting minor applying for a job writing accounting software).
Depends on the honors program—some of them, getting in is simple but completing it to get the designation is hard.
If you’re in one of the latter, it’s probably worth including it if it’s a job near the university (so they may have some local knowledge that graduating from the honors program means something) or you know that someone who’ll be reading the resume knows your university well (so they similarly have knowledge of the program). Otherwise yeah, there’s no real payoff for including honors aside from Latin honors or the meaningful nationally known ones like ΦΒK or ΤΒΠ.
(Also, FWIW, I just checked my CV, and the current version is 13 pages using 11-point font—and I’ve spent my career at teaching-focused institutions, so mine is pretty short, relatively!)
