Instructor Blogs

White papers are a difficult genre whose nuances are hard to catch at first. A white paper may seem like just another report. As the Thomson Handbook describes it, "white papers are used in business, industrial, and governmental contexts to sum up what's known about a subject" (235). White papers are used commonly for their specific ability to sleekly present technical or policy information and to give the pros and cons of various options.

*I put this in entry in the wrong location. I apologize if there was any confusion.

Ethics are so important that I feel bad relegating them to the final week of the class. After the scandals at Enron and other companies, business schools and corporations are taking renewed interest in ethics, so don't be surprised if your new job spends a lot of time focusing on ethics. And it should. Ethics work best if everyone lays the groundwork and the expectations from the beginning. In fact, be worried if your new job doesn't stress ethics right away. If they don't, you will want to research your company policies on your own to make sure that you understand them.

Because everyone in the class is an upperclassman, I assume you have all done thorough research projects before and know most of the ins and outs of researching. However, research can be tricky, and more importantly, time consuming. Often professionals will read 5, 10, 20 or more sources for every one that actually gets cited in their work. It takes a lot of work just to orient yourself in the topic, more to narrow down your scope, and even more to support your argument.

Now that you've written a resume, the next step is to flesh out that information in a cover letter. One of the biggest mistakes people make with the cover letter is just repeating information that can be found on the resume. What's the point of that?

I can see from the responses to the last instructor blog that many of you are now appropriately discouraged. Now I'd like to discuss ways to make you stand out from the crowd. Good application materials can help you score the job you want, or at least give you a fighting chance. The last thing you want to do is send out a mediocre or terrible resume. Without hyperbole, I can say that a resume is one of the most important documents you will ever produce. The irony, of course, is that it will be read in 10-30 seconds, and if you don't make that cut, you get thrown away.

Getting a job sucks. It can be one of the most frustrating and time consuming endeavors you ever undertake. Many people say that getting a job is as difficult and time consuming as having a job. I wish great job searches on all of you throughout your lives (as you'll probably have to undertake many, according to labor statistics), but if you have a rough job search experience, know you're not alone. When you look for a job, you are competing against hundreds, sometimes thousands of other candidates.

Design is much more crucial than many people realize. It is not merely something that pretties up content or dresses up information. Good design is part of the form of a document, adding content, persuading the reader to read, and directing the reader to relevant information. In an age inundated with information, good design is becoming more and more critical.

Everybody hates technical instructions. The prevailing notion is that they are confusing, useless, and time consuming. Often, product users never read the instructions at all. Jim Gee argues in his book "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" that successful video games are good at teaching people how to play the game as they play. After all, no one cracks open their copy of Halo III and reads the instruction manual first thing. They pop it into the console, and then later consult the manual if they have problems.

I am always surprised at how lightly my freshmen students treat email with their professors. I worry that students, accustomed to using email for communication with friends, feel that email is merely a casual and informal medium. When these students hit the business world, where email can often have serious consequences, they will be in for a rude awakening. Because one of my goals for this course is to prepare you for the workplace (if you're not there already), I want to stress heavily that email in professional and academic environments is a serious communication format.