A month ago, an article about Duolingo was published on
Quartz and it sparked a discussion among contributors in Duolingo Incubator. Some think the article is inaccurate in many places, but one point that led to a longer discussion is about putting our (voluntary) work on our resumes. I put it on mine, many others don't.
Which made me ask myself, why did I put it on mine?
Of course, I put a bunch of other stuff on my resume, too. Obviously there's contact information, education history, and professional experience. And aside from the volunteer experiences and other activities, I also put in the online courses I completed, awards I won, and languages I mastered.
The last three things are easier to justify. I took economics courses online to reveal my interest and familiarity of basic economics theories despite my background from astronomy. I showed off my awards to hint at my ability to excel academically. I listed the programming languages to demonstrate my exposure to quantitative analytics.
My activities with Duolingo Incubator, though, would not directly tell you what aspect of myself I am selling. (And that's the point of a resume, isn't it? To sell yourself.)
On the face of it, I was not applying for a linguistic-related position. But even if I were, I had other credentials to emphasize. I like to think listing TOEFL/GRE scores are rather crass, but they could do. Of course, if the position had asked for someone with academic training in linguistics then I would be out of consideration regardless.
So my intent must have leaned towards showcasing my skills. In the discussion I mentioned earlier, a fellow contributor posited that volunteering in the Duolingo Incubator is an evidence of one's persistence, stubbornness, and patience--with a streak of insanity. But of course you would only know this if you are familiar with the workings of the Incubator. Most people don't--many has never even heard about Duolingo at all.
Evidently, we are not paid for our voluntary contributions. Ostensibly, this shows that we are employer's dream employees for willing to work hard for free. I think this is an overtly cynical view. Only predatory, exploitative employer would extrapolate that because a candidate listed voluntary activities in their resume they will hold that against them (maybe in the salary negotiation?). If that were the case, they shouldn't want to work for these employers anyway.
I have never been in the receiving end of my own resume. Naturally, or it would have been weird. So I can't tell you how my Incubator activities are being seen by the people who read them. The closest remark that I had was from Héctor--then a prospective employer, who said that I was "pretty enterprising", having seen the meandering path that I took with plenty of detours from astronomy to parliamentary debating,
Tohoku reconstruction, and Amnesty campaigns (this was the days before I joined the Incubator).
Seeing that they then hired me, apparently listing volunteering activities did not hurt me. But I feel that in my former workplace, at worst, volunteering is neither here nor there. My boss volunteered in a health clinic. Some colleagues also did a stint with
Indonesia Mengajar, which tend to come with ancillary volunteering activities once our stint was over. When I later took charge of the recruitment, candidates' volunteering/organisational activities were never the main reason behind our recruitment decision, but it's likely reading a list of volunteering history in a candidate's resume made me see their profile more positively[1].
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| A relevant infographic from Deloitte. Source: here. |
In the end, I think it boils down to the fact that it feels great to be able to contribute in the Duolingo Incubator. I first joined when
the English course for Indonesian speakers was still in Beta phase, and it has now reached 4.06 million users. That's almost the entire Costa Rican population using our course, right there. I had also designed the reverse course:
the Indonesian course for English speakers, which Duolingo will hopefully launch into Beta this August. Figuring out the best structure to teach Indonesian in Duolingo has led me to find hidden gems of language resources, which had been really interesting.
Furthermore, I have to vet, recruit, and onboard new volunteer contributors in Duolingo, too. My interactions with the applicants and fellow contributors has also taught me what (not) to do when you need something done--which I can easily translate into my actual professional environs. It helps me grow.
In my resume, putting it there is my declaration of how I grew, and how I'm seeking to grow. That, I think, is really the reason why it's there.
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[1] I'm not alone in this. In 2013, Deloitte surveyed 202 HR executives and found that the skills and experience acquired through skills-based volunteering are favourably viewed among most HR executives. Read more
here.
Here is eternal spring: for you
If you have at least one openly queer friend/colleague with whom you rarely discussed gender/sexual issues anymore because you've had this conversation years and years ago, it's often easy to forget that you are living in a bubble. You see queer representations (admittedly skewed towards able-bodied white cis gay men) regularly on the media and do not gag, you read the celebratory #Lovewins hashtags and your heart feels warmed, or you might have enjoyed the parading revelry as cities burst into colors for Pride Month. You are definitely living in a bubble.
My suspicion was largely right. For much of the first half of the book, I read but did not really get what's actually happening. Miéville seems to have a penchant for erudite words. Many argued that he wrote this novel with a thesaurus open. I think if he had to take a GRE for his graduate study--maybe he just wants to not waste all the fancy vocabularies he acquired for his test. It's the only way for me to rationalize prose like these:
