Working Harvard Into Your Resume?
Sure, get Harvard on your resume if you want to be successful...
…at being a douchebag.
Let’s face it, going to Harvard already set you way the hell back if your simple goal was to avoid becoming a tool. If it wasn’t Harvard College that you attended but HBS instead, then congratulations, Bayesian analysis suggests that 80% of the population will go after you first when the apocalypse comes and food supplies are running low. This will hold true no matter which population you live among. If you live only among other people from HBS, then it’s 100% who are out to get you, not 80%. You can’t outrun statistics.
But believe it or not, there are even bigger tools out there than Harvard grads — yup, the people out there who pretend they’re Harvard grads. I mean, it’s bad enough being a douche, but it takes a real douche to want to pretend to be a douche.
Here’s a classic example: the dude who puts Harvard in bold on his resume when all he did was attend a weekend management seminar at HBS, get drunk at the Hong Kong three nights straight and sleep with one of his colleagues from the Association of Corporate Communications Professionals. Cocktails and clymidia are nothing to brag about, in case you needed a reminder.
And yet these people make up a big chunk of the population. I’ve interviewed a thousand people in consulting and tech, from entry level to C-suite, and probably 10% of them, inevitably after attending a series of mediocre schools, somehow find a way to put Harvard at the top of their education section because they attended some “executive” workshop that their company wasted a bunch of money on. I don’t even bother to interview them anymore.
Key Non Sequitur: It’s a general rule that the word “executive” in the title of anything means that it’s not really for executives.
These folks might as well write something like this on their CVs:
HARVARD1 2016-2020
This holiday season, remember: If your company buys you a $35,000 weekend at HBS, go for it, make the most of the cocktail receptions and your semi-attractive colleagues, but don’t put it anywhere on your resume because in this case, what happens at Harvard should stay at Harvard.
Happy Thanksgiving folks, and in honor of the upcoming Harvard-Yale Game, a Yale post is coming up next.
[Business Review Reader]