Applications, for anything from jobs to even some extracurricular activities, are stressful. For me, the most straightforward part of the application is the resume. Unlike essays or personal statements, it usually isn’t open to subjective interpretations. It also isn’t as impromptu as interviews tend to be, regardless of how much preparation went into the answers. For these reasons, crafting a good resume would be incredibly helpful and would possibly reduce any anxiety during an application process. During the workshop, Seema spoke about different ways to structure and write resumes. Here are some of the points we discussed:

We discussed the importance of tailoring your resume to fit a particular need. Some ways to do this would be to alter the structure. When applying for a research position in a lab, it would be useful to highlight any prior research projects or papers. This could be done by adding a section about past research experience near the top of your resume, or by making it the most detailed section.

When writing a resume, it is also important to remember that the evaluator may just read it for a very short amount of time. We had an activity where we attempted to read someone else’s resume in 15 seconds or so. This highlighted the importance of considering time constraints of the evaluator, and ensuring that your resume is clear and concise. To make a resume easy to read, a few things to avoid would be excessive amounts of writing, unusual styles of fonts and unusual structuring (Having the content split into two columns of writing).

At the end of the workshop, I came to the conclusion that my resume needs a lot of work. Something that came up at the beginning was that you could always work on your resume, to tweak and improve it. The workshop provided a lot of tips and ideas on formatting resumes that I’m likely to use in the future.