Resume writing is soooo important to college students.  In this stage of our lives we’re constantly filling out applications, many of which simply require a cover letter and resume.  In those two sheets of paper how do we make ourselves stand out to internship coordinators at the same time remain professional?

I took away many new ideas from GRF Seema.  One of my new personal goals is to keep from having gaps within my work timeline.  Hirers may be concerned by seeing a time gap for x amount of years or months months where I didn’t have any type of position.  This is especially a red flag in this stage of my life.  I should be constantly gaining new experiences to cultivate my skills and develop myself professionally.

My second goal is to gain certifications that will set me apart from other applicants.  Before I graduate I want CPR training.  I would also like to complete workshops to become advanced in recent versions of microsoft computer programs, photoshop and indesign.

Last Thursday, I participated in a resume workshop to go over the basic elements of a resume and what information should be put in it. While I already have a resume that I frequently update, it’s nice to go back to the basics every so often.

At the beginning, the participants of the workshop and I briefly discussed the difference between a CV and a resume, as the two documents hold different meanings despite sometimes being used interchangeably on applications for jobs and internships. We also touched on the purpose of resumes, as they can be used to help “sell yourself” to a hiring manager and give them a “snapshot” of who you are as an individual, before breaking down the individual elements of a resume (for example, education or relevant experience).

Part of the workshop included acting like a hiring manager by having every participant trade resumes with another person and the person leading the workshop giving us around 10-30 seconds to read them. It was interesting to see how people market themselves through their skills, classes, internships/jobs, and activities.

Although the workshop was mostly review for me, I still learned new information regarding how to present myself. I also met individually with the workshop leader after the event ended in order to gain more insight regarding how to improve my personal resume. I recommend that for future resume workshops, it would be beneficial to have a member from the Career Center help lead the workshop and provide examples of resumes in specific career fields, such as art versus engineering versus physical/social sciences.

In a pool of 1,000 applicants, the chances of securing the internship or job position boils down to five seconds. So, if that is the case, how does one stand out and truly give a representation of one’s work life, personality, and skills in under five seconds? The answer to figuring this out lies in the resume: A self-representation of one’s offerings.

To truly be a contender, one must make sure the basic structure of a resume is adhered to and the readability of the resume is maximized. To do this, basic components of a resume such as one’s contact information, objective, education, and leadership position are included. This must be done for one to be taken seriously in the job market. Doing this allows for the interviewer to keep reading past the two second mark. The one second mark would be for the interviewer to take in the resume and assess if the resume is worth the read.

To really stand out, one must have that one highlighted feature that allows them to stand out from the rest. It could be a really appealing objective statement, the design of the resume, or the experiences one has done.

I really believed this seminar to be wonderful in helping me redesign my resume and to further improve my resume.

Last Thursday, I attended GRF Seema’s talk entitled “Mini-Seminar Series: Writing an Effective Resume.” A resume is such a difficult document to compose, as it is essentially a compilation of the events of your entire life limited to a sheet of paper. For this reason, I have trouble being concise on my resume. I’m a junior, but I still have some high school activities and awards listed on the document. It’s difficult for me to eliminate this part of my life from the document, as it was such a significant and important 4 years for me. Plus, I’m always afraid I’ll delete something from my resume that may have potentially made an employer choose me for a job had I included it.

I also find writing a resume to be frustrating because, while the document reveals the experiences that you have had, it doesn’t directly showcase who you are as a person – good-humored, determined, motivated, witty, and/or intelligent. A resume can only indirectly imply that you are these things, but it is difficult to interpret what a person is like based on a written list of what they have accomplished and experienced.

Last Thursday, I attended GRF Seema’s mini-seminar on constructing a resume. As someone who had never really received any kind of instruction or guidance in crafting a resume (maybe explaining my bad luck with internship applications), I was glad to receive more formal, structured guidelines for my resume (and my CV – the two are very different, as we learned!).

Seema was incredibly clear and helpful, and I did walk away feeling better prepared to tackle any future applications; at the same time, however, I couldn’t help but feel a little dejected that so much of my future was hinged on a piece of paper (or multiple pieces of paper, in the case of a CV). Where’s the section on my human joys and sufferings? My trivial habits and quirks? My beliefs and opinions and morals? My Myers-Briggs personality type?

Obviously, these factors probably are only vaguely important when employers or schools are considering me for a position, so of course they aren’t sections on the standard resume – but why don’t employers or schools consider these factors? Can they really glean enough about me from a few pieces of paper and one or two brief interviews – in which I’m most definitely going to be faking it until I make it – to be certain that I’m a better or worse fit for their institution than other candidates?

Thanks to the seminar, my resume is at least 200x more put-together now than it was before the seminar – a good thing, since this piece of paper is the key to almost anything I would ever want to do in the future. But it’s still strange to realize that for countless people, their only perception of me as a human being – with my own set of minor and major life experiences – will be from a series of arbitrary achievements and power verbs.

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.

Last week, I went to a short resume workshop given by GRF Seema. Going in, I had a resume already which I used for various applications. However, I thought it couldn’t hurt to get some advice to possibly improve it. I appreciated the point that employers or whoever might be reading your application will likely only spend a short amount of time glancing through your CV or resume. Therefore, it’s a good idea to make it easy for that person to see certain points which you want emphasized. It seems the best way to do this is through ordering and choosing which points to describe in detail, but NOT through the use of extensive colors or fonts as GRF Seema warned against. After the workshop, I believe my resume is still fine, but I learned some tips, such as the one mentioned here, that I will definitely keep in mind for the future.

Last Thursday I attended a seminar on how to create a resume. Like most, if not all, of the students attending this seminar, I was  (and still am) currently applying to summer internships, and I was looking for pointers that I hadn’t hear from anywhere else. I had known some of the items gone over in the seminar before, such as putting contact information at the top of the page, being conservative in use of fonts, and not listing soft skills. However, other things, such as using active verbs, and not including anything from high school, were new to me.

I do wish that GRF Seema had told us what we were going to do with the paper copies of our resumes that we were to bring to the seminar beforehand. I had come in with the assumption that we would be editing said resumes during the seminar, but instead we ended up switching resumes with one another. To be honest, I was embarrassed of my measly one page resume when I saw that most people around me had a lot more with them, and having to share it with someone else was nerve-wracking. In retrospect, I wish I had brought a sample resume from the internet instead.

Last week I attended an interesting workshop on how we should write our resumes to be most effective and appealing. Some of the things that most surprised me from this workshop were how little time any employer would spend looking at a resume. It made me take a step back and look at my resume and how I constructed it. Rather than spending a lot of time crafting beautiful job descriptions, it was probably better to focus my time on finding good action verbs to start off my bullet points with.

The fact that employers will look for time gaps in resumes really surprised me. It seems that employers expect potential candidates to always be doing something, and even a summer off can look suspicious. This got me thinking a little bit about the intense work culture that college students all go through. Taking time for yourself or not being productive is seen as wasted time. It’s a little disheartening to see that in order to be hired, all that is really valued is your productivity and references.

I definitely will apply some of the tips into re-working my resume, and really appreciated the advice given to us by our GRF.

I attended GRF Seema’s Resume Writing Workshop and it was very helpful. I was reminded of how critical a resume is for job and internship applications, and eventually medical school or graduate school applications. The resume is one of the first impressions on the employer or admissions officer, and is extremely important. A surprising fact to me was that sometimes a resume is only looked at for about 10 seconds before a decision is made to continue or reject the applicant.

GRF Seema first discussed the differences between a CV and a resume, which has some important distinctions in the content of each document. She also provided many tips and advice about formatting, such as where to place relevant information and the commonly accepted ways to structure the document. One difficulty about resume writing that I quickly realized is how to make a resume look unique and stand out, without appearing too unorthodox and unprofessional. One important takeaway I had from this event was the idea of a resume as a “living document,” that is always being edited, updated, and improved on. This is applicable to other areas of academics, not only resume writing, which I think is important to keep in mind.

I’m really glad that I attended this workshop hosted by our GRF Seema, who is super helpful and patient in telling us how to write a professional CV and resume. As most of the students attending this workshops are sophomores joniors and seniors, we all really need to learn about CV and resume for applying for internships, and building up the skills for applying to jobs after graduation, or applying for graduate school. So this is a very important skill that we should all learn. However, as an arts and sciences students, we don’t feel as prepared in terms of how to write this kind of self-presenting forms in a professional way. I’m so glad that I came to this workshops, which made me realized so many misconceptions that I had and how should I change my resume.

I especially like when she told us in the perspective of how the other side of the table think about reading a resume. Since as job recruiters, they may only spend a few seconds to scan a piece of resume, so to stand out in numerous applicants, we need to know what will the recruiter looking for and what we should put on one piece of paper. We went through the basic components of resume from name , education, experiences, relevant courses, and additional skills, and how should we form and organize the font and avoid too colorful background, and also avoiding confusion to the reader is also important.

I learnt a lot from this workshops and I edited my own resume after this workshop and I really feel it becomes more professional thanks to the help of our GRF Seema!

At the Resume Workshop this past Thursday, Seema explained how to create an effective CV. We started the discussion with differentiating between a CV and a resume. I didn’t realize that a CV was much more detailed than a resume, and that a resume should be more tailored for each application. Seema also explained the differences between an undergraduate CV and a graduate CV, and how they should include different elements. For example, a graduate CV should have a strongly-worded objective, but it can be more of a waste of space on an undergraduate resume. Additionally, a section on extracurricular activities is not welcome on a professional CV, unless those activities directly relate to the position. And even then, the heading should not be “Extracurricular Activities” but instead something like “Additional”, “Other”, or “Related Experience”.

My most surprising realization came with Seema’s statement that employers may not spend more than ten seconds reading your resume or CV. That’s right, ten seconds. This made me realize that my resume needed to be restructured to highlight my most important experience. On my own resume, I realized that my “Additional” section was too long, and looked like I had little related work experience. To solve this, I restructured my subheadings to include more content under “Work Experience” and edited the descriptions of those jobs to highlight skills that would be useful for the jobs I am applying to.

It was no surprise that this week’s seminar on resumes was packed. GRF Seema began by explaining the difference between resumes and CVs, before then going on to list the major items that should appear on a resume. We then had a peer review session where we read each other’s resumes. Seema’s tips were very similar to the critiques I’ve received from the ILR Office of Career Services in the past, so I’m glad that non-ILR students have the opportunity to hear great advice for their resumes through the Scholars Program. Seminars like this are very helpful for students and I would love to see more of these in the future.

This week I went to an event about writing resumes. I learned a lot that I did not know before. For instance, I did not know that it is not professional to write a resume in two columns. I really liked how our graduate student went through all of the individual subsections we could have on our resumes. It really helped to know all the different ways to display information in a professional manner. I liked how she also pointed out that we could combine different subsections to display other information that might not fit in one subsection. I think this event made me realize just how difficult it is to judge how different employers may view one resume. I also realized that learning to write a resume could take years because people are always revising them to fit every step of their careers.

In addition, although I feel like crafting a good resume is one way to have a good first step when finding jobs and internships, the entire process made me feel less confident about looking for positions. I feel as if there is so much to know that the information can get overwhelming. All the aspects of your resume and even interview you have to consider are important. Even at the end of the event, I think we did not get though everything there was to know about resumes and CVs.