Resume is one of the most underrated part of your college application. It is a 1-page document giving a brief overview of your achievements, an aspect of yourself out side of school and work. it is a critical piece of documents where many recruiters look for the final time before making a decision. Following are a few tips for you to draft your resume for university applications.
The importance of a resume
Your resume showcases all of your life accomplishments in a single page. If someone wants to see if you are worthy of a consideration, the first thing they take a look at is your resume. They might not look at it for long but if your resume catches their attention, you have passed the first round.
How to write a resume
Personal details
This section has your name and contact information, you will be mentioning your current address, email address, your personal phone number and so on. these details should be on top of your resume making your name stand out.
Education
Academic achievements are an important part of the resume of a university applicant. They show case the primary subjects of interest and generally how good the candidate is at their studies.
Be sure to mention your latest qualification, field of specialization, name of your institution, and the year of passing.
Work experience
This is a section of resume you should work a lot at. Make sure it is easily read and wrote in large bold noticeable fonts. Be sure to include the name of company you worked with and mention your job position as well.
Make bullet points for your responsibilities and accomplishments.
Co-Curricular activities
Mentioning your extracurricular activities will make you stand out of the generic resume crowd. Let them know about your interests in life outside of the school and work. mention your classes for arts if you take any. This makes you a three dimensional being, something that lets you off the hook from the crowd of resumes who got marked for not putting in efforts.
Community service
It is optional if you want to talk about your work as a volunteer or as an intern for a charitable organization. You can skip this section if you have not done such work. although many people take a year to perform community service, so if you wish you can do same towards child education, women empowerment or environmental protection so you can include it on your resume.
Skill
This section is roughly divided into two categories; hard skills and soft skills.
Hard skills are your acquired knowledge like HTML, Google Analytics, Excel or any other programming languages. Soft skills are your personal strength such as communication, leadership, and so on. you need a good mixture of both to make your profile stand out as competent profile for the job.
Hobbies and interest
Your hobbies do not have to relate or overlap with your subjects of interests. For example, you can be interested in quantum mechanics, and at the same time love to play flute. Let your interests be visible here whether they are reading, dancing, sketching, or anything similar.
Keep in mind that this is not really a high priority section, so if you need more space for other more important sections, you can skip this one.
Things to keep in mind
- Do not let your resume expand beyond a page. This way all your accomplishments are easy to comprehend with a single look on a single page.
- Use a lot of bullet points. Use it to sort the list of your contribution at work, cocurricular activities or volunteering experiences if any. Even your certifications, hobbies and skills should fall in a single line.
- Prefer active voice over passive voice. Use words like managed, achieved, conducted, designed, and authored to showcase your accomplishments.
- Have a few points on your profile that make you stand out of the generic copy pasted resume crowd. Let these achievements be sorted between the values university focuses on.
- Do not use I’s and t’s. cross check your grammar and spelling several times before submitting. Even a single alphabet typo can stand out in a single page resume.
Resume writing format
After the contents of the resume, it is important to acknowledge of their placement just as well. If you have attractive content and it is not put out there the best way, you lose your advantage. Following are a few tips that would help you with resume formatting.
- Use a single standard font through out your resume. Fonts like New Roman or Calibri are easily available, easily readable and recommended.
- Differentiate the size of heading and content. Let all the headings be in bold and at size 14 while rest of the document is smaller at 11 or 12.
- Leave a margin at both sides.
- Keep space between heading, subheading and the text. It is important for a document to be a bit spacious so it does not look cluttered.
- Save your resume in a PDF format.
You should be honest about yourself in your resume. You will often hear people advising others to exaggerate their resumes to look good. Know the recruiter will find out eventually and that completely demolishes your credibility. Try to ignore that way at all costs.
Once you have written your resume, proof read it multiple times to make sure all the information provided is correct, then re-read for grammar and spelling. You can also take help of a friend or family member to make sure your resume does not have any errors on it.
