“It says here that you worked at NASA, before serving as a Supreme Court Justice…”

Originally published in The Groove, October 2007

A Stark View
By Tracey Stark

“It says here that you worked at NASA, before serving as a Supreme Court Justice…”


Recently, several high-profile cases have come to light in Korea involving people in important positions who apparently have lied on their resumes. It shouldn’t be shocking that someone would twist a few dates or titles to make them look better to a potential employer. Heck, even I’ve extended my dates of employment to make it look like I’ve never been jobless in my life. But what these recent cases have shown is that there is a right way and a wrong way to fake your resume.

Wrong way: Claim to have graduated from an Ivy League school with a doctorate as well as a bachelor’s and master’s degree from another school, when, in fact, you didn’t go to any university. This is what Shin Jeong-ah did, and with much success for quite a while. With those claims on her resume, she landed work as assistant professor of art history at Seoul’s Dongguk University and named a co-director of the prestigious 2008 Gwangju Biennale. (As of this writing she was being sued by both the school and the Biennale foundation.) When she returned from the U.S. last month after her supposed search for proof to support her claims, she was questioned and then checked in to a hospital for stress, as is the custom here when you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

Right way: If you don’t have the gumption to go to university for the long haul and get your degrees fair and square, pick a lesser school, perhaps something in Nunavut or Puerto Rico, and buy some quality forged diplomas and transcripts. These things are available on the internet. If you pick something prestigious, you will end up running in the same circles as people who actually did go to those schools. This will lead to awkward moments and unanswerable questions. You will get caught. The lesser-known the school is, the less likely people will even want to talk about it, for fear of embarrassing you (or themselves, if they, too, claim this school as their alma mater). This is your second best choice next to actually going to school.

Besides educational records, your employment history is the other category in which you can and will get stung if you get too carried away.

Wrong way: Claim you are qualified to coordinate disaster relief for an entire country, when the sum of your actual experience amounts to going to school and being a member of an international Arabian horse club. This person is, of course Michael “Heckuva job, Brownie” Brown, the former head of the U.S. government agency FEMA, whose job it was to save people from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

According to his resume he had been a university professor, an assistant city manager in charge of emergency services, and a director of a nursing home in Oklahoma. As it turns out, Brownie was in fact a student at the university, an intern for the city manager, and a lawyer of whom his boss said “he was not serious and somewhat shallow." Now, had the flooding from Hurricane Katrina been a bit more shallow, and the FEMA response a bit better, then perhaps the stuffing in Brownie’s resume may have stayed intact. Still, had he really done a “heckuva job,” the fame he might have gained as a “hero” would have outed him in the end.

Right way: If the truth about your employment history includes something like “Loading dock worker at The Electronics Depot” then consider it completely okay to change your title to “Logistics Supervisor.” Or, if you were a prep cook at a fast food restaurant, feel free to rewrite it to read “Sous Chef, Burger Barn.” Neither of these lies will raise an eyebrow, but both will add to your overall ‘hire me!’ allure as a potential checkout clerk.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my duties as Chief Domestic Engineer. (My wife gets a bit upset when she comes home to find the dishes unwashed and the cats’ litter box full.)