Having built my entire translation/transcription/freelance writing business through online freelancing websites like Guru and so on (initially, not anymore), I’ve written my fair share of proposals. I didn’t understand why some were getting rejected so frequently and so I created templates that had various “styles” of the way they approached the projects and tracked how many were accepted/declined/responded to.

But its when I posted a job looking to hire someone that I finally got an understanding of how to write the most effective and attractive type of proposal and here it is:

1) READ and acknowledge the project description in its entirety. You don’t need to regurgitate it, but make sure to highlight the key points I need and why you’d be the best provider for it. For example, I recently posted a project for English->Spanish translation work in the web design field. Telling me you’re familiar with web design terminology is a lot more relevant than telling me you have experience with medical terminology, even if that is true as well.

2) Watch your grammar! This is one of the proposals I received:

“call me and we can get started on this right away I am N***** and I am in T**** and I can work on this starting today for you. It sounds like a pretty good job and After I talk to you I can give you a better proposal. I have skype and a phone.”

Not a chance that I’m going to hire this person. First, they provided me with absolutely no information on their background or expertise and sent me a sloppy proposal that looks like it was tapped out on an iPhone while they were trying to catch the bus. Although they acknowledged that I requested the provider be available on Skype, they have NOTHING else going for them. Also, I know its a pretty good job and I’m going to give it to somebody who wrote a good proposal.

3) Don’t write Sir/Madam or “Friend” — the website I use allows you to view my profile. Although it doesn’t give you my full name, I would rather be addressed by my user name or, if you see my picture, you can tell that I’m clearly female and you can call me “Madam”.  The “Sir/Madam” greeting followed by the standard template you insert in all your proposals show me that you did not take the time to read my project description. As for “Friend”, I’m not your friend. I’m hiring you for a job.

4) Inject a little personality in your proposal. I was once hired for a transcription gig because the client read my blog and thought I was funny. Sure, I don’t expect all of them to take the time to do that, but when I write my proposal, I try to inject a little humor and personality into an otherwise anonymous, strictly virtual relationship. I want to show I’m a real person who will listen to and meet their needs.

5) Provide a sample if I request it. I am a freelancer too and writing a sample for every single client I send a proposal to would be ridiculous. However, if I feel the client is serious and they are asking for a reasonable sample, for example: 3-5 minutes of transcription work, 40-50 words of translation work, previous articles I’ve written; that’s fine! It’s likely that another provider will be willing to write a sample and that if you’re not, I’ll likely not hire you because I don’t want to commit until I’ve seen your work. If the sample requested is more substantial, I will offer to pay for it.

6) Last but not least and this is so important — do not abuse the messaging systems of those sites. In my last description, I specifically put that if the provider messaged me privately with their bid info (as opposed to writing it in the designated “bid description” part of the proposal form) that I would immediately decline the bid. I understand why you would use the private messaging function — to follow up, ask specific questions, etc. — but not to harangue the client into hiring you. In fact, I turned down proposals I’m sure came from highly qualified people simply because they did not follow the directions I asked. What does that say about the way they will follow my directions in the future? Not very much.

Hope that helps!

I recently (yesterday) had a bad experience with a person working in a customer-service industry. She, the cashier/employee of the establishment, was the only point of contact I had with a person there — in fact, she was the person who represented the “company” to me.

And she sucked. Rude, condescending, snide remarks — she made the other girl I was with burst into tears. I don’t have feelings so that didn’t happen to me but I did get upset enough to ask for her manager’s number and today, I spoke to her manager.

In the usual routine of what follows this type of incident, I restated the incident to the manager, she apologised, and offered me something for free.

But then she did something I did not expect, she tried to justify her employee’s actions by saying something around the lines of “____ is a very nice girl but she does have the tendency to come off as very harsh and rude. She doesn’t mean it.”

I was a bit baffled by that statement because quite frankly, I don’t care if ____ serves meals to the homeless in her spare time, she had 60-seconds to interact with me and in 60-seconds she didn’t appropriately demonstrate the qualities that I, if I ran that place, would want my employees to show. With that said, I’m not sure who is more at fault: the rude employee or the manager who tried to justify it.

Thoughts?

I was kind of surprised to see yet another article confirming (and reaffirming) the correlation between telomere length and cancer mortality. It seems like this has been studied ad nauseum but an article published in JAMA on the 10th July focused on just that.

A little background (for the non-science nerds out there): telomeres are small regions of DNA that protect the end of your chromosomes (these hold your genetic information). A good way of thinking about a telomere is to compare it to that little bit of plastic at the tip of your shoelaces: it kind of just holds everything together and keeps the whole lot from unraveling.

In our genes, telomeres have the important role during replication of our DNA to act as a buffer so that we don’t lose any crucial genetic information. Each time our DNA replicates, a little bit of the genetic information is lost at the end of our chromosomes, but that’s ok, that’s what the telomeres are there for. After replication, an enzyme called telomerase helps rebuild the telomeres.

But, they also serve another important purpose: the telomeres, despite being replenished, shorten after each replication and at one point, when the telomeres are too short, the lifespan of that particular cell is over our body takes care of destroying it. Kind of like spring cleaning. (In fact, this is called cellular senescence, and it basically means the cell has lost the ability to continue dividing.)

Unfortunately, cancer cells have a “defective” overactive telomerase (the enzyme that rebuilds the telomeres after each replication) and this allows for repeated, plentiful cell divisions even after the cell shouldn’t be dividing anymore. That’s where the term “immortal” [cancer] cell comes from. You can read more about that here, Rebecca Skloot wrote a book about the HeLa cell line, a cell line that was harvested in 1951 and continues to be used for research today. One prominent discovery, thanks to the HeLa cell line, was the polio vaccine.

What I found most interesting about this particular article was that it claims that cancers associated with a high fatality rate, like lung cancer, head and neck tumours, bladder cancer, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and so on showed a more prominent relationship with telomere length while “less aggressive” cancers (colorectal, breast, etc) did not show as strong of an association. And, measuring the length of telomeres in current cancer patients could be used as a new measure of survival.

Oh — and this particularly paper didn’t mention this little fact, but what carcinogen has shown an increased association with shortened telomeres? Nicotine. Bad, bad, bad.

Citation: Willeit Peter, Willeit Johann, Mayr Agnes, Weger Siegfried, et al. Telomere Length and Risk of Incident Cancer and Cancer Mortality JAMA 2010:304(1):69-75

My boyfriend lectured me yesterday and I gotta give him some credit.

Blog is going on hiatus: I’ll still be writing for Killersites and Brain Blogger as I’ve contracted with them and get paid but this one will be on hold for a wee while.

If you miss me tons you can e-mail me at melissamalka [@] gmail [dot] com

(Sorry, Dad.)

I’ve been pretty adamant about my stand against marriage for about…7 or 8 years now. Last Christmas-time, I took my cousin Samantha to Tiffany’s so she could pick out a necklace and took a peek at engagement rings. I don’t know…I mean I like shiny things and all but you could propose to me with a puppy and I’d be fine.

Sidenote: for those of you who know me, you know that I have talked about and accepted the fact that I will possibly get married in the future. But, for those of you I’ve actually discussed the topic with, you also know that I am fundamentally cynical about the idea of marriage and that my reasons for doing it are slightly, admittedly, skewed. Also, I believe in pre-nups. Another fact, an ex-boyfriend broke up with me because of that.

End sidenote.

I decided to read one of the many academic articles I downloaded by Dr. Zak titled: “The Rule of One-Third”, which, as defined by the article:

“The Rule of One-Third guaranteed wives a life interest in one-third of their husband’s estate upon marital dissolution.”

Apparently, this rule goes back to the old days of Romans and paterfamilias. Now, the article is rather interesting as a whole but the part that caught my brain was when Zak listed the “three motivations for institutionalized marriage” and here they are:

1. Women needed a guarantee to a man’s resources because of the high cost of childbearing. So women wanted a guarantee of commitment before making babies. (Note, this is not accounting for baby-mama/baby-daddy situations where poor decisions are made!)
2. There is no room for complete vertical integration in marriage (one party cannot completely “own the other”) and so, the institution of marriage meant there were less “high transaction costs”.
3. During “Early America” years, women had limited access to jobs and resources, incentivizing them to marry.

And, how many of those reasons apply today? Not many. Dad always says to me how “women today are making men irrelevant” and that’s coming from a guy who’s been with some pretty powerful women. It seems as though the “traditional” reasons for getting married have become void over time. Women today don’t need a man to have resources and men today don’t need a woman to have babies. Although they do need a woman, it’s not necessary for them to even impregnate that woman, or even meet her for that matter. Adoption, artificial insemination, surrogate mums…the list goes on.

So I’ll go ahead and be the cheeseball that says that there is, in my mind, only one reason to get married and it’s one word: L-O-V-E, love. If you’re going to get married, do it for love because everything else is possible without marriage (as is love), but with love, the last legalized form of indentured slavery makes sense. Don’t do it for money, babies, or a green card.

And sign a pre-nup.

Two things made me think today, an impressive feat as I slept < 5 hours last night.

First thought-inducer: Grown Man’s post of yesterday where he discusses an attached man dining with a single/possibly attached (her relationship status is negligibly important) and in what situation this is appropriate. Ok, so I dine “one-on-one” with men all the time. Clients (for the freelance gig), bosses (for the medical gig), friends, and so on. Do I consider it treacherous territory? No. Do I consider ittreacherous territory if the guy pays? No, he’s my client dammit, he better pay. Do I consider it treacherous territory if its a “nice restaurant”? Not usually, but it becomes dangerous at one point.

Example: a few months ago, Brendan (the straight besty guy friend) and I went to dinner at what could be considered a fine dining restaurant here in Chicago. He wore a nice shirt that wasn’t inside out (trust me, this is a big deal) and didn’t wear flip-flops (also a big deal) and I wore a real shirt, not a white T-shirt from the kids department of Target. We had an appetizer, main course, and shared a dessert but never ONCE could someone have walked in and thought we were on a date. The demeanor was just NOT there. Also, he paid, but that’s because he was making up for being a bad friend.

So what is inappropriate? My line is slightly more left than most women’s but I will say that there are some situations I don’t approve of and they fall under the single category of “anything that feels like a date”. If it feels like a date, you shouldn’t be there. And, if its something that happens all-too frequently — thats probably not cool either. I can’t find the source but I read a study a couple of years ago that showed a correlation between the proximity between two people and the likelihood they would cheat on their spouse with them. It can be summarized as: someone you may not necessarily find desirable in most circumstances will seem so because of time spent together and shared experiences (like working together). What that means, in theory, is if I were ever to cheat on the future Mr. Malka, it’d be with a doctor at the hospital I work with. Shared experience, shared time = adultery. Fuck science, here’s how to prevent that: share your experience with your significant other. Plus, most surgeons are class douches.

Second thought inducer: Wife Swap. Yes, the bad TV show. The premise of the show: two families get a new wife/mom for the week and have to abide by new mom’s rules and schedule. In today’s episode, one of the women was a self-titled “fitness mom” and worked out three hours a day. At first, I was like “ok, that’s cool, woman’s got guns” but then she talked about how it was her ex-air force fighter pilot husband who got her into her CRAZY working out routine and showed them working out side by side and she was doing a lot of man-moves. Dislike. First, give the girl a break, boobs are part of femininity and b) I hate when couples merge every single one of their interests and pastimes and essentially become an amorphous blob of cheesy pet names and sappy YouTube video moments.

Ok so I love working out and if one day, Boyfriend was like “MelMal, I really want to go to the gym with you today and see your rippling six-pack abs in action” (THIS IS MY BLOG, I CAN WRITE WHATEVER I WANT), I’d be like “Sure boyfriend”. Would I want Boyfriend to see my grunting like a rhino during bicycle sit-ups on a regular basis? False. Also, working out is my drug and alone time.

Basically, you can share in your sig-other’s activities without becoming their little clone. You’ll be better off because of it…trust me!

Grown-ups are supposed to make wise choices, like what to eat for lunch in order to have the most productive day possible.

Observe Exhibit A, the dilemma:

And Exhibit B, The Decision:

Sorry.

Do I eat it or does it eat me?

Do any of you remember during the 2006 World Cup final when Zinadine Zidane headbutts another player (I forgot who)? It was a bit much, don’t you think? I know Seth Macfarlane of Family Guy fame thought so. Point is, Zidane overreacted…and we humans seem to do that a lot, so what is the physiology behind it?

Daniel Goleman, in his 1996 book on Emotional Intelligence, coined the term “amygdala hijack” to refer to disproportionate emotional responses to a perceived [emotional] threat.

Let’s first discuss the facts:

• Biologically speaking, our emotions are there to make us “pay attention”.
• Our brains process sensory information in a very linear fashion: thalamus -> neocortex (where the thoughts happen) -> amygdala (where the emotions happen).
• When a potential threat is perceived, the brain bypasses the cortex (no thinking) and goes straight to the amygdala (where the emotional response is formed).
• This emotional response can overpower the brain in mere milliseconds.

And how to control it? Or, rather, why should you even try? Well, at best, a 5-second emotional outburst of anger makes you look like an idiot in front of your peers. At worst, it’ll cost you your job or your relationship. So much like you try to flex a muscle, work on improving your EI (emotional intelligence).

• Identify your triggers. Dr. Nadler, CEO of True North Leadership (a firm specialising in applying Emotional Intelligence in business) discusses the “5-second rule” in one of his articles. Wait 5 seconds. Ask yourself what set you off, ask yourself what emotion it made you feel, ask yourself what you want now, and figure out what you need to do to get it. There’s a slight difference between what set you off and what emotion it makes you feel. You may find that several different triggers will lead you to the exact same emotion, which then leads you to overreact.
• Identify their emotional state, then proceed with caution. The unknown is scary; so make it known. Studies showed that when participants viewed pictures of people expressing various emotions, they processed the information in entirely different parts of their brains once they identified the picture’s emotional state. Labeling = more cognitive control.

And finally, remember that more IQ = less EI and vice versa. When the amygdala (the heart of your brain) is filled with increased blood flow and oxygen, the prefrontal cortex (the brains of your brain) is less activated. What does this mean? You lose some IQ points when your amygdala is supercharged. This leads to a deficit in problem solving ability and rational thought. You can’t change that, and you wouldn’t want to because the amygdala is crucial for our fight-or-flight response, but you don’t want to be “that guy” wondering “what did I just do?” (Yes, Kanye West, I’m talking about you and your stupid move during the Music Video Awards…what the hell was wrong with you, man?)

And so comes the end of “radical honesty” week. It felt good to get back to being more honest with other people, but especially with myself.

I’m late for an evening out but will recap more tomorrow!

I made this graph because I like to use science and math to quantify my relationships.

***Special thanks for the concept goes to B. Florez.