I don’t think so, unless he or she was an officer or did something in the club besides sitting there. I’ve never seen Mensa membership on a resume, and I’ve seen plenty from people who definitely would qualify. As for getting a job, joining a professional organization, with people in your actual field, would seem to be far more useful.
I don’t know if this proves anything, but there was no Mensa chapter at MIT when I was there.
Another former Mensan here. In my case it was pretty much so that I could have a way of showing that I wasn’t an idiot to other kids at school, so I suppose fairly typical.
I haven’t and wouldn’t put it on my CV. I can’t see it doing any good, really, and I can certainly picture it doing harm. There’s not really any job I can think of which it might be appropriate to mention for.
I’ve seen Mensa references a couple of times, on actuaries’ applications, under “other interests”. The applicants were referring to their recreational maths interests. It seemed reasonable enough to me, and no different from noting their hobbies in any other area: sporting, musical etc. Mensa membership *per se *would not have got them the job though.
Please tell me this has been elaborated on somewhere, because I’d love to hear about it. Either this person was a complete idiot, or very ballsy.
I wouldn’t assume that Mensa membership would be a requirement for publishing their newsleter.
Errrr, no, we aren’t concerned with self-congratulation. At least, not any of the chapters or members that I know of are.
However, because of the misconceptions and outright hostility many people have about Mensa, no, I wouldn’t put just plain membership on a resume. Putting Mensa offices and responsibilities on a resume might help, though.
Nope, I haven’t posted about it before. The guy was a complete idiot AND ballsy. I think that he ordered one of “Dr. Dino” Kent Hovind’s* kits on “How to Debate (and win) the Unchurched”. He is probably a fine preacher, but he doesn’t understand the first thing about science. When I questioned him about just what, exactly, a scientific theory is, he developed the classic “deer in the headlights” look, as he could tell it was a loaded question, but he had no idea how it was loaded. I asked him similar questions on other subjects, and it was pretty clear that he had no idea what he was talking about, he clearly was working from someone else’s program.
The space guy, on the other hand, had a master’s in space science or something similar, he had a certificate saying that he was qualified to talk about lunar rocks, he’d ridden the Vomit Comet, he had made a 3D representation of the gravity wells and various Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system, and had clearly developed his own lecture. Guess which one I enjoyed more?
Oh, we send out our newsletter for publishing. However, one of the members edits it. We’ll pay for the publishing service, but we won’t pay for someone to edit it. In fact, we will not pay for a lot of things. For instance, if the local group wants to pay for a meeting space, they have to pay for it out of their own treasury, the national group won’t pay for it. Same thing with speakers, in fact I’m pretty sure that it’s against the rules to pay for speakers. This is how we end up with folks like the Young Earth Creationist, we tend to take what we can get.
*Kent Hovind, for those of you who can’t place his name, is the “scientist” that Jack Chick frequently refers to. I’m thinking of writing up a little article about him for the newsletter.
I would tend to reject a resume with Mensa membership (or an IQ score) on it. IME, truly intelligent people don’t feel the need to point it out, it’s just assumed.
Here’s a fun comic about Mensa that came immediately to my mind when reading this post…
Right. As **Lynn Bodoni **suggests, if a group of any significant size can’t find a member among them to edit its newsletter, they have more problems than they know. A newsletter must contain only two things: A listing of events, and a record of its officers’ meeting. Anything else (puzzles, humor, columns) is extra. This can be accomplished with as little as an oversized postcard. Farming that out to a non-member indicates desperate straits to me.
Chapters are organized geographically, and MIT would have been covered by Boston Mensa, http://www.boston.us.mensa.org. There aren’t any chapters solely at universities.
When you join, you’re assigned to a chapter based on your ZIP code; if you want to change chapters, you simply inform the national office of your desire and they switch you. Some people live in one area and work in another; some husband-and-wife members split their memberships between adjoining groups to take advantage of all the events.
Sorry to slight hijack. This was what I remember taking away from this book as well. Funny in spots but in the end it’s a book about a guy who wants to tell everyone about what he is reading. Not too many plot twists there. From the very beginning he has confused knowledge (of trivia) with intelligence. It was recommended to me with a “I thought of you when I read this”. What does that say about me I wonder?
As for the OP. Considering that it is a club that disqualifies something like 95% (99%?) of the population, I don’t think MENSA on a resume would have a good chance of impressing. While MENSA may not actually be made up of Trekkies, I suspect that is the impression a lot of people have of the group.
My point was that you can refer to the job of editing/publishing the Mensa newletter on a resume without going into your membership status in the organization.
Agreed. If you’re very good at desktop publishing, maybe you do that for several organizations. Mensa, Kiwanis, some church, the humane society, the health club. That would look good on a resume. If you’re the president of the local Mensa chapter and have organized conventions that hundreds of people have attended, and edited a magazine, and written prize-winning humor columns, and chaired scholarship programs, wouldn’t that look good on a resume? Why would you leave it off?
My resume got me a job.
You wouldn’t leave it off, because that would be relevant experience. Mere Mensa membership isn’t relevant experience.
For somebody applying to a job like mine, I can pretty much guarantee you that putting Mensa membership on your resume would be a one-way ticket to having snarky comments made about you. We’d still do a professional resume review and interview loop if appropriate, but Mensa membership is irrelevant at best.
I’m another person who would definitely NOT suggest a person put Mensa membership on a job application, unless it’s tied to relevant experience. I think many people – and in full disclosure I include myself in this group – find something pretentious and exclusionary in the entire idea of Mensa. I personally would not consider Mensa membership a +1 on a resume. It may be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the group, but I would be concerned that it indicated both giving too much weight to their own intelligence and a potential inability to deal well with people who are less smart.
I was advised by several people I respect never to include Mensa membership on a resume. Too many people assign their own assumptions to what it means, and then proceed to exercise their insecurities in relation to the conclusion they reached.
i.e. This means she’s brilliant, and I’m not, so she’ll treat me like dirt.
This means she’ll show up in a Star Trek Uniform on “Captain Kirk’s Birthday.”
This mean she’ll sit around pondering the meaning of the work and nothing will get done.
This means she’ll be “smart” and I can give her partial information expecting her to psychically divine the rest and still get assignments done correctly.
Very seldom will it be: “This means she has a talent for learning, and making abstract connections, which would help her see the big picture of how her work affects the company as a whole.”
See, this to me is an example of the problem. Anyone outside Mensa who doesn’t think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread is “exercising their [personal] insecurities,” whereas Mensa actually is a “talent for learning, making abstract connections [and] see[ing] the big picture.”
It overstates what it means to be in Mensa, IMO, and it overstates what it means if an outsider is dubious about Mensa. There’s an arrogance in both sides of it that IMO is a legitimate red flag for how a person might get along with others.
When my brother was an Electrical Engineering student, he once got a job offer based, as far as we can tell, solely on his membership in Mensa.
I have a liberal arts degree, and my Mensa membership has not helped with any job searches.
So, the definitive answer seems to be, “It depends.”
I’m curious. It’s been noted that Mensa members get a wallet card. Is there an actual use for it? Do you have to show it to get into Mensa events? Or is it just to whip out occasionally for an intellectual dick measuring contest? 
Heh. I think you’re right. Personally, I would be slightly suspicious if someone listed MENSA membership on a CV (unless it was because of some relevant role they played in the organization), mostly because the idea of the organization seems like the type that would attract horribly insecure people that accuse others of being insecure. I mean, most organizations are based around a common interest of their members; they like kayaking, or service, or reminiscing about wars, or whatever. The fact that the commonality in MENSA appears to be nothing more than performance on intelligence tests, and excludes 98% of people based on that, is something that a lot of people just aren’t going to like, myself included. I would probably qualify for MENSA, unless I’ve gotten a lot dumber in the last ten years, but I have friends who are brilliant but don’t test well who would never qualify. So, to this outsider, it seems like a silly and arbitrary way of forming an organization, so, while I wouldn’t avoid someone upon finding out they were a member of MENSA, I’d make fun of them if they were my friend and strongly encourage them to not put it on their CV.
Unless, of course, they knew that the person hiring was also in MENSA. In that case, I’m sure they’d be a shoe-in.
I’ve been a member for over 20 years and have never, on any occasion, been asked to show my card. However, from time to time (to vote in Mensa elections, for example) I’ve been asked for mey membership number, and in that case I take out the card to show myself what that number is.