• Question: if you were to apply for a job and they asked you to list your greatest achievements what would you put at the top

    Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Fiona McLean

      Fiona McLean answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Ooooh this is a tough one! I think at the moment it would have to be getting my undergraduate degree. Man, that was hard work! However, I think if I get my PhD then that would go to the top. Some of the other things I’m really proud of are the places I’ve travelled to, some of the volunteering I’ve done. I would really like in the future to discover something in science that could really help people who are sick. Then that would definitely go to the top!

    • Photo: Anna Bramwell-Dicks

      Anna Bramwell-Dicks answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      This is really, very hard!

      With any job application you have to think carefully about what the recruiters are looking for when you answer. So, if I was applying for a teaching job I would probably say that my greatest achievement so far was receiving an average score of 4.8 out of 5 for a course that I redesigned and rewrote. That’s a really high mark!

      But, if I was applying for a research post, I would say that my greatest achievement so far was writing a book chapter, which has been published! (The book is called Music and Human-Computer Interaction and I wrote Chapter 4 http://www.springer.com/computer/hci/book/978-1-4471-2989-9).

      When I finish my PhD that will definitely be top of my list of achievements though, because it has been really, really hard work!

    • Photo: Zhiming Darren Tan

      Zhiming Darren Tan answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Given where I am now, probably my PhD will be an important differentiator – though I will have to be more specific if applying for a research job where everyone else would also have a PhD. So it depends which job you are applying for.

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