Job Searching Tips

Malama Tsimenis says incivility in the classroom runs the gamut from carrying on disruptive conversations and text messaging to verbal hostility. In her workshops with colleagues at the University of Toronto, she warns that this sort of behaviour can have serious consequences and offers suggestions for preventing and responding to it. Dr. Tsimenis, a humanities lecturer at U of T, recently shared her thoughts with University Affairs.

UA: What is classroom incivility?

MT: To me, it’s any behaviour that jeopardizes or undermines students’ learning experiences and hijacks the atmosphere in which learning takes place.

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It is unlikely that you know anyone who works as a professional tarot card reader. Yes a professional. I know hundreds of people who claim to be able to read the Tarot cards but they just do it as a hobby, dabbling, and most of them are awful at it, treating it as a game.

The truth it is that do a reading for someone is an enormous responsibility because they listen to what you say and act upon it. If you are asked to advise them on whether or not something will happen or what they should do it is very important that you give them the right information, so I do not approve of treating it as a game or a hobby. Do it properly or do not do it at all.

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I’ve heard debate recently about cover letters – are they important, do you need to write one, etc.

Cover letters are kind of hard to write.  Maybe they are more of a pain, really, than they are hard to write. And anything that is a pain to job seekers is questioned… “waa, waa, do we really need to spend more than 3 minutes on this thing?  Waa…”

It seems that if we have to take more than a few clicks to do something in our job search, it’s a waste of our time.

Not true with cover letters.

Let me share an experience I had this morning.  It was with a LinkedIn introduction, not a cover letter, but the concept is similar.

I got a LinkedIn introduction request from someone who I didn’t recognize.  Turns out, I have

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This is one of the most dreaded interview questions, but if you understand the reason interviewers ask it and what they’re looking to uncover, you’ll see that you can certainly prepare for it.

The question about your weaknesses comes fairly soon after the interview begins and typically after such a question as, What are your accomplishments? or What are your strengths? Those two questions—if delivered correctly—let you sell yourself. They’re positive questions. Then—to contrast them—comes the awkward question about weaknesses. This question is not easy for the interviewer to ask, and it’s even more difficult for most people to answer.

So, what is the interviewer after? He wants to tes

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It’s a lesson I fear I’ll never learn.

Yesterday I was feeling stressed.  You see this morning is my child’s first Field Day and she is excited to have one of her parents come and watch and play.

• As my husband is traveling…that would be me.
• I would really like to get a run in.
• I have 2 clients currently and one potential who would like my help…yesterday.
• There is a luncheon happening nearby that I would like to attend.
• I usually make sure to get in a pilates session once a week and have not yet done so this week.
• My little one has baseball at 4p.

And that’s when my heads starts twirling and my stress level rises and I start to get upset. Until…I reme

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