Resume Tips
Where to Start
1. The first thing you should do for your resume is write down literally every single thing you’ve done during high school. Even if you only did it for one week. Even if you only did it for one day! Even if you got injured and had to quit. Even if you didn’t have a leadership position. Literally any reason you have for not writing down something you did…ignore that and write the thing down anyways. We will remove things, but first you need an exhaustive list.
2. Next, write down the basic information under each thing:
The Organization Title
Your Position Title (if you had one)
What Years? (e.g. freshman, junior)
Hours per Week (best estimate)
Weeks per Year (best estimate)
3. Next, write down a small paragraph about each activity. Something like what you would write for a resume, of course. Focus on the following things:
What did you accomplish in this activity, if anything? An award? A big event? A dollar amount on fundraising?
What responsibilities did you have? Be very specific and detailed here about what you were in charge of.
What did you like about the activity? I find this is useful to write down for your own sake, and can shape some of what we write into the resume.
4. At this point, you can bring your resume to me, or send in a Digital Review! I can’t help you with anything above, because I just don’t know what activities you did, how long they took, or what you accomplished in each one. But, once I have that information, I can help you finish your resume!
If you want to finish the resume yourself, though, here are a few more tips.
Tips from Chelsey
Focus on accomplishments and quantify everything. Your reader doesn’t know how big of a deal anything was unless you tell them. So, tell them precisely how many people you managed, how much money you raised, how many people attended your event, how many players were on your team, etc.
Tell them about unquantifiable things through those feelings you wrote down. So you planned some smaller team events, but really only 2 or 3. Doesn’t look that impressive. Okay, let’s phrase that as “Created team cohesion and a friendly dynamic through team social events”. Maybe you just volunteered at a senior center a few times and your hours aren’t that high. No worries. Let’s say you “Fostered connection and friendships across the age gap”.
When it’s time to cut things down, remove anything that you didn’t have much to say about. If it was really a struggle to write even half a sentence…then ditch that activity. Next, ditch any activities that were a long time ago and that you weren’t that attached to. Any activities that you didn’t like can also go. And, for the purposes of college strategy, anything that will show up elsewhere in your application should also be ditched. These include your SAT score, GPA, AP scores, and honestly your email, phone number, and the name of your high school. The colleges will see those things elsewhere. Don’t waste precious space on them, even if your scores are all beautifully stellar.
Tips from a Former Google Exec
These tips are from an article about Jenny Wood who worked at Google nearly 18 years, hired many people, and founded a massive career development program for Google.
Only use a one-line bullet under your job titles.
She says that it shows your reader “such discernment” in deciding what needs to be conveyed about the activity. I (Chelsey) think this is part of why the Common App only gives you 150 characters for activity descriptions, and many college supplemental essays are 150 words or much less. Can you exercise restraint and intentional brevity?Add “quirk”.
This one is more cute, but could be impactful. The idea is to show that you can be both serious and fun. That you have your clear passions aligned with whatever institution to which you’re applying, AND you have some side passions, too. Institutions are looking for passion and curiosity anywhere they can find it on your application. Wood’s suggest was to add small icons to indicate hobbies, or even a short line on your resume to encapsulate one of your deeper side passions.
Tips from an ex-Nvidia Recruiter
These tips are pulled from a CNBC article. You can read the full thing, or check out the applicable highlights below. Not everything in the business world applies to College Strategy, but a lot of it does!
Don’t use colorful fonts, charts, or graphs.
“When I used to work at Google, people would always submit artistic resumes with charts and the Google colors,” Fackrell says. Instead of writing one list of titles and accomplishments spanning the width of the page, they’d split their resume up into columns and quadrants. Some of these resumes are also “not easily readable,” which makes your qualifications harder to discern. When it comes to how to format your resume, “make it boring,” she says, adding, “no colors, no charts, no graphs, no pictures.”Don’t just list your daily to-do list.
Instead, your resume “should be a list of your accomplishments, mixed in with some job duties.” If you just list your daily duties, it makes hiring managers think “there wasn’t a whole lot of effort put into” writing the resume.