‘Couldn’t find a real job’: Chinese professor’s self-deprecating and humorous resume a social media hit
- The academic jokes that he ‘recently found it’s easier to muddle through astrophysics than muddling through nuclear physics’ in his resume
- He is not the only nonconformist, another professor in the same university says: ‘He should not be able to win the Nobel Prize, so he only studies what he is interested in’
The resumes of two Chinese professors have trended on mainland social media for their down-to-earth, humorous and self-deprecating tone.
A story about the resume of Hu Jinniu, a professor at the School of Physics at Nankai University in Tianjin, northeastern China, was among the most viewed news items online over the weekend.
He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Nankai University in 2006 and started his PhD study the next year. Hu added a sentence about his experience during this time, “Don’t ask me what I experienced during this period”, he wrote on his resume on the university’s website.
He received his PhD degree from Osaka University in Japan in 2011 and spent the next couple of years carrying out postdoctoral study and was a visiting scholar at various institutions around the world, only because, “he could not find research work or a real job like teaching at that time”, wrote Hu.
He said he has published more than 40 thesis papers in international academic journals, including two publications which he defined as “poorly qualified”.
Hu, a scholar on nuclear physics, published some papers on astrophysics in the past few years because, he joked, he “recently found it’s easier to muddle through astrophysics than muddling through nuclear physics”.
He wrote that he is a reviewer for some academic journals because he was asked by friends to take on the role. He is also a member of the council of a national nuclear physics society thanks to “the support from bosses in this field”.