- A resume is neither an extended business card nor a tiny autobiography. It’s an advertisement that explains to a specific employer why they should interview you. A good resume changes all the time, depending on what you need it for and who will read it. A resume is your side of a conversation with an employer in which you show why you are a good fit for a particular opportunity.
- Peer mentors in the ACES Hub can be helpful in getting started with your college resume. For deeper dives or writing a CV for grad school applications, the ACES Career Education team is here for you.
Resources to Get You Started With Resume Writing
- Action verbs: Use this Action Works list, provided by The Career Center, to find vigorous verbs for your resume bullet points.
- The way you say it: Find your part-time jobs and activities on Handshake to get suggestions about conveying the skills that you developed in those roles.
Tips For telling your story effectively on a resume
Content - Communicating Key Skills and Ideas
- An effective resume will show how you meet the stated needs of a specific employer. Read the position posting carefully to understand what the employer wants.
- Most resumes are glanced at, not read in detail. Format your resume to make your most relevant experience obvious.
- Employers care more about what you can do than whether you were paid, so dividing your resume into paid “experience” and unpaid “activities” is not always helpful for conveying your qualifications. Headings can emphasize the most pertinent parts of your story, e.g. “Museum Experience,” “Coding Projects,” “Communications Experience,” “Laboratory Research,” etc.
- Different versions of your resume may look radically different. That’s okay.
Content - Resume Sections
- Objective statements, summary statements, and the like are rarely helpful on an entry-level resume, where they take up space that could be better used to describe your experience. They are very useful, however, on your LinkedIn or other profiles.
- Academic achievement looms large when you are in school but matters less to many employers. Include your GPA if it’s high enough to be a selling point or if the employer specifies a cutoff. Avoid long lists of awards, scholarships, and honors.
- Do not mention references unless they’ve been specifically asked for (in which case your references’ names, titles, email addresses and phone numbers can be added as the second page of your resume).
Page Format
- Keep it to a single page.
- Look at the overall format: is it balanced and readable? Show your attention to detail with consistent formatting, indenting, and margins.
- The first reader of your resume can often be an applicant tracking system (ATS), so avoid eye-catching templates, fancy colors, and multiple columns, which the ATS will struggle to interpret—aim for clarity and simplicity.
Seeking Feedback
- Feedback from others ensures that your resume communicates in the way you want it to. It’s great to have a friend or family member check it for typos and errors but go to the professionals for a more in-depth review.