Weeknotes 2024W36

Learned about federal hiring and applied

I was browsing USAJOBS and came across a job that is in the location I want, I’m excited about, and I’m actually qualified for. Perfect! After browsing the department’s website, I found a live information session and résumé webinar they were offering the next day. Even more perfect!

The session was from 23:00 to 01:15 my time and it took a lot for me to be ready and focused that late. I’m glad I was though because I learned so much about federal hiring. Federal résumés are wildly different from private sector ones. Here are the key takeaways that I found the most surprising or helpful:

  • Read the job announcement. Some departments and agencies have specific requirements. Read the entire job announcement to make sure you are following instructions.
  • If it isn’t on your résumé, it didn’t happen. When hiring managers look over your résumé, they are not going to assume or imply that you have certain skills. It has to be clearly written down and detailed for it to count.
  • Include the day in your start and end dates. For the specialized experience, they calculate how many weeks of experience you have with a certain skill at the next lower grade level. By including the days, you make sure you get the credit you deserve for time spent using that skill. Again, you must show that you have 52 weeks of full time experience to be qualified.
  • Anything not connected to dates and hours per week will not count towards your qualifications. Write down exactly what skill you used, how often, and how long.
  • Use the OPM MOSAIC competency library [PDF] to craft relevant bullet points. Under a given posting, they will tell you what competencies you are graded on (e.g. problem-solving, computer skills, writing, etc.). The competency library lists the definition of those and you can use the language in there to make your bullet points more relevant.
  • Responses to the assessment questionnaire should be clearly backed up by your résumé. Write everything down to get credit.

Armed with all of that knowledge, I came back the next morning and spent the entire day hammering out a federal résumé to apply. I used all the keywords and phrases from the announcement and only included relevant bullet points for all the jobs I’ve had since after high school. By the end, I was feeling pretty confident and qualified. I still am. What a rush.

But we’ll see in the next few weeks if it comes to fruition.

Attended some wedding festivities

In personal news, my host brother in Morocco is getting married this weekend. I wrote about Moroccan weddings a while ago and this one was largely the same. Read that post if you want more depth and some pictures but this will be a short version.

There was a big lunch under a tent for nearly the whole neighborhood. As usual, we had sweets, nuts, dates, and tea while the Quran was being read and elders shared religious stories. After that, the first course of djaj mhamr (grilled chicken with olives and preserved lemons) was served. That was taken away and replaced with hem brquq (braised meat with figs). These are two of the best meals in Morocco. The last course was a fruit plate with grapes and canteloupe.

Everyone chilled out for a while and got ready to go to the bride’s house in the neighboring town. We all piled into cars and a big group of women got into the back of a truck. Yes, a truck with a canvas tarp over the top that you might ship fruit or vegetables in. The convoy drove through town with horns blaring.

At the bride’s house, they welcomed us warmly. The men sat in one room while the women sang and danced and took pictures with the bride and groom in another. After a while, it was time for dinner. It was djaj mhamr and hem brquq again. I felt a little sick by the end of it because I was so full.

As we were driving back, I was reflecting and felt honored that this family took me, the weird American, to their exclusive family wedding function. They brought me because I’m part of the family and I think they trust me enough that I won’t make too many social faux pas.

We got back and a crowd had assembled around the hmada group. It’s a group of men that play drums and sing at weddings in a way that is very specific to my region. I don’t know how they maintain their energy because they jump around from around midnight until four or five in the morning. I didn’t have the energy for that so I walked home and went to sleep.

Tonight is the actual wedding. There will be food and way-too-loud music under the tent. The bride will come out in a beautiful outfit to take pictures before going back and repeating that process for a while. She’ll sit in a carriage (?) that will get hoisted into the air by four men, one at each corner. Everyone will take pictures and dance and laugh.

Writing this is a nice quiet time before all that.

Bits and Bobs

  • How to Live By Your Values This Year by Casey Rosengren and a hat tip to Sasha Chapin’s I was not acting like me, are you acting like you?. Good articles about values and how we live (or don’t live) in alignment with them.
    • I really liked the idea of a value being a verb + adverb. A verb is actionable and an adverb defines how you do that verb. For example, instead of having “wisdom” as a value, it could be changed to “learning humbly.”
    • I added a prompt to my daily journal entry: “What is one behavior from today that connects to your values?”
  • Graphs World. A daily puzzle that shows you some graph and you have to select the dataset that fits the graph. The graphs aren’t very colorblind friendly but still fun.
  • The Moral Implications of Being a Moderately Successful Computer Scientist and a Woman by Irene Y. Zhang. It’s easy to hand-wave the existence of sexism away by saying “yeah, yeah, I would never discriminate against a woman, I treat men and women equally, etc.” It’s important to remember the unconscious bias and moral fallacies men hold towards women, especially in STEM fields. Entitled by Kate Mann has been added to my reading list.

    For example, my very existence as a moderately young, moderately successful computer scientist threatens some men’s sense of identity, thus making them uncomfortable and/or lash out. But if a successful woman in computer science makes men in our community uncomfortable, then we are not likely to have too many successful women in the community.

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