You're mistaking maturity for age. I don't try to figure out how old an applicant is. What I am interested in is their life experience. If I have someone who did a 4 year undergrad and someone who spent 4 years being a secretary during that time, then obviously the latter is a better candidate because her experience is directly related. But my post clearly said, all things being equal. If one has a BA and the other one spent 4 years working at a nail salon, as a bank teller and at Starbucks, I'm still going to probably look at the BA person more because the skills the other individual has are largely irrelevant to what they'd be doing as a legal assistant.
Then I misunderstood you and I apologize for that. I thought you meant equal experience didn't matter.
People with a BA, I at least know that a) they can read and analyze what they've read, b) work independently on small research tasks, and c) write/draft documents. We'll have to work to mold them into being specifically helpful to our group/organization and of course there is a learning curve, but the fact that I know that they have those basic skills means that it's a great starting point.
But here's the problem with that. A, B and C are all things you are supposed to have a firm grasp of at the end of high school based on our standard of education. I didn't even go to a very good school and I remember all three of those things being drilled in to me.
I can tell you that over the number of years when I've been involved in hiring legal assistants (or clerks or paralegals), never, and I mean [/i]never[/i] did I, any other lawyer, or any HR person give a hoot about what these people did in high school. Usually that would be on the bottom of their second page of their resume and nobody even read it.
On resumes people list what they were doing in college all the time. For me, since I was only in college for two years, I list both college achievements and high school achievements. I list what I believe is relevant to my skills, and if someone doesn't take high school seriously for that, then that is an error on their part. It can be a huge mistake not to look at high school experiences on employee resumes of young folk, though my resume puts an emphasis on my experience in the professional world.
After you have a degree I agree that it's silly to list high school on your resume, but you learn the same skills in high school that you do in college. The level to which you take those skills shows a lot about you. For example, chess is a game of critical thinking and strategy. I was captain of the chess team two years in a row and won regional championships. Leading and organizing an educational club showed time management skills. Retaining high honors while doubling up on classes and working internships, like many people do in college and brag about on their resumes, is also something I did.
I took those skills into the real world and used them to further my freelance career. Without those skills, I would not be able to do what I do right now for a living. But I didn't get those skills in college. My recent job experience consists of doing contract work with clients, reaching out and advertising, answering emails for the boss, building web and gaming servers from the ground up, designing and installing layouts for drupal and movable type, mild programming, getting 80+ hour jobs done in only 1-2 weeks, being on call for to handle server crashes 24/7 (and I do get called at 3am to fix things sometimes), etc. If I'm not professional when dealing with clients, we don't get business, and since this is a contract position, if I don't get business, I don't get paid.
Unfortunately I've had people not take this list of skills (which is only related to one of my jobs, I have freelance skills listed too with references) on my resume and still insist that I needed college.
i was backing up Irvine
and i'm not "twisting" anything - i just thought it was amusing you would say you considered yourself so clever, that's all... i just find it strange when people say stuff like that about themselves really...
No, how about this. How about I actually have confidence in my abilities after spending years relying on them so I don't go broke? How about, after growing up with no self esteem, I finally get the confidence in my own intelligence that I never believed in for years to acknowledge that "hey, I'm actually smart"? Except when I do that, someone is "amused" that I "think myself so clever". Not only that, but you WERE twisting it. I implied that, if someone with a degree was not as smart as myself (a college dropout I specified, which is self-depreciating), then there was something going wrong with college and it wasn't some infallible thing. I wasn't even trying to brag about myself, I was using my experiences as a tool to prove a point.
Many people seem to mistake confidence with cockiness. We think that if someone says they're smart, or someone says they're strong, or someone says they're good at something, they're just bragging. They're not. I'm sure if we were having this conversation in person and you heard the tone in my voice you would have never once assumed that. Yet, you do.
And yeah, I'm pretty smart. I'm sorry if my being aware of that while also being acutely aware of my flaws makes me arrogant or amusing to you. Did you know that intelligence isn't everything? You can be the smartest person in the world but still not know the first thing about life. I'm still figuring all that out. But at least I know I'm book smart and can think for myself. It helps me along this journey, learning about life and the people in it.
Pat got lucky and his program was a little more comprehensive than most.
