The Sample Job Application: Fill & Download for Free

A job applicant literally listed my credit as his own.He came in for the interview and showed me his video editor sample or ‘reel’. We got to a certain part and I asked what he did on it. He lied and said he did all the creative and technical editing.“Interesting” I said. That’s my work you showed me.He admitted his sole job was to make a copy of my work. He was obviously embarrassed but I told him I don’t hire liars.

I was an Accounting Supervisor working for a smaller, venture capital owned company. I was doing well and taking on additional responsibilities. However, the Controller I reported to had been there seven years and had no plans to leave. The VP of Finance above him was associated with the owners or former owners in some manner. Bother we’re very nice but left me with no upward mobility within the company.So, I began researching other open positions and applied for an Assistant Controller position at another manufacturing company. It was a promotion in position and responsibilities. I was interested and went through several rounds of interviews. At the final interview, they presented me with an offer that was only $2,000 more than I was currently making.I took the offer letter, went to the medical facility for the required drug test—another story here, just wait—and went home to discuss with my wife. It was a quick decision as I knew the market for Assistant Controller positions was more like an $8,000-$10,000 raise.I called the company and declined their offer. They truly seemed shocked and complained that I had gone through incurring the expense of the drug test. I explained my expectations and they didn’t counter offer. So, I moved onto other applications and ended up getting a significant promotion that helped transition my career from accounting to information technology.Now, back to the drug test. While I was waiting for my paperwork to be processed, a female had to give a urine sample for her drug test too. I understand it’s mot as easy to do this for women as it is for men. She was in the restroom for a long time. When she came out, she either handed the sample to the nurse or the nurse obtained the sample from the restroom—don’t remember which as this was about 25 years ago. The nurse asked the lady why the sample was colored blue—I knew where this was headed. The lady had just urinated into the toilet bowl and then proceeded to scoop out the specimen bottle worth of toilet water and urine. Thus, the blue color. The facility intentionally had coloring in this toilet to detect if anyone wou d do this, which could modify the test results. The lady seemed dumbfounded on how else to provide the specimen after explanation by the nurse.While the lady may not have faed the drug test, she failed the street smarts test or the ability to have critical thinking skills or ask questions if she didn’t understand. Unbelievable.

I’ll make three observations, offered with little hard evidence. I’m a statistician, after all. None are intended to be judgmental or insulting, nor are these statements universally true, of course.1.I think, as a rule, mathematicians take enormous pride and great satisfaction in doing very abstract work - the more abstract or “hard,” the more it’s valued and respected.I would go so far as to say that within the broad community of the mathematical sciences. there’s a hierarchy of merit in the eyes of those on the more abstract end of the spectrum - the more applied a field is, the less esteem it tends to merit.Statistics is, of course, about as applied as it gets, so the lowly statistician is plankton in the mathematical food chain.Maybe this is just human nature. We tend to value the qualities we possess in abundance. On the other hand, I don’t like humorless people.And, of course, we statisticians have our own biases. John Tukey (a proper mathematician who converted to statistician!) once said that the best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everybody’s backyard. We tend to take a lot of pride in our vast adaptability and ability to contribute to application. We tend to value this far and above abstraction for the sake of abstraction.2.I suspect most mathematicians have taken exactly one statistics course. There will be lots of counterexamples, of course. Many graduate students earning a PhD in mathematics will pick up a Masters degree in applied statistics, just to expand their job market.The mathematician that thrives on rigor and proof will likely detest an introductory statistics course, which has none. Such a person may spend their career thinking of statistics this way, not recognizing that there are, indeed, mathematical underpinnings at the subject’s roots. What’s sad, to me, is that I think any pure mathematician would find true joy in, say, estimation theory, which is elegant and beautiful mathematics. They’d love a good course on linear model theory, as long as it doesn’t involve actually fitting a model to actual data and then dealing with all of the attendant rules of thumb. Which brings me to my last observation.3.I think mathematicians bristle at some of the vague and imprecise rules and generalities they encounter, especially in introductory applied statistics courses taught to a mathematically unsophisticated audience.I’m sympathetic.Take, for example, the very commonly taught rule of thumb: When the sample size is 30 or more, the sampling distribution of the sample mean will be approximately Normal. Apart from being simply incorrect, there’s typically little or no justification for where this rule comes from. I have to think this really gets under the mathematician’s skin. Of course, rules like this come from “experience,” and it’s simply loosely true for most populations… whatever I mean by most. This kind of loose, vague language really affronts the mathematician’s sensibility.And, introductory Statistics courses are chock full of these kinds of rules.Once while I was on sabbatical, a mathematician colleague of mine was tasked with teaching an introductory Statistics course with no mathematics prerequisite. I think it was a prison sentence. Of course, the text was filled with such rules of thumb. Two or three weeks into the semester, I stopped by to ask how he was doing and to offer any help. He complained to me “there’s nothing in this class to grab onto.” I think a mathematician would understand exactly what he meant.Final anecdote: The first time I encountered a dismissive mathematician was in grad school. I took a year-long Masters-level course on analysis - the prerequisite for the measure theoretic probability courses I would be taking. At the first quarter’s midterm exam, I had scored just above the class median. The professor must have known I was in the Statistics department, so he approached me after class and said “why don’t you come over to math and do the real thing.” I’ve always regretted my horrible, nasty response: “Because when I finish my degree I want to get a real job.” He was unskilled and clumsy, but I was just mean, and didn’t recognize that he was trying to be encouraging in his awkward way. Several years later, when he had moved to another university, I sent him an email message with an apology. I don’t know that he remembered, as he never responded.Oh, and maybe mathematicians don’t like statisticians because they’re too long-winded. Sorry.