Writing your college application resume may be one of the last things on your to-do list, and we wouldn’t blame you if it is. When you’re applying to college, the resume is one of the last things students, parents, and teachers talk about — and often they don’t talk about it at all. The silence around the college application resume is probably because the Common App doesn’t make much of a fuss about it either. The resume is practically hidden in the application, and it is typically noted as optional. Why spend much time on something if it’s hidden and optional, after all?
Well, we think there is at least one really good reason to focus on the resume: because so few other students are focusing on it. When you are applying to college, you need to take every opportunity to differentiate yourself from the pack. Your grades will differentiate you. Your activities will differentiate you. Your essays will differentiate you. And going above and beyond by doing the optional things exceptionally will differentiate you.
So, while the resume isn’t the first thing you need to do for your application, and may well be the last one you finish before pressing submit, every student we work with submits one.
BEFORE YOU START
Before you begin pulling together your resume, ask friends, family, mentors, or your college counselor at school to show you their resumes. While yours will not look exactly like a post-college professional resume, seeing what a professional resume looks like will help guide you toward your final product.
PICKING A TEMPLATE
Once you’ve reviewed a few professional resumes, you’ll need to pick a template for yours. Whichever word processor you use, it will most likely have templates for resumes that you can select from. You will be able to change the section headings and input your own details, but be sure to pick a template that is neat, uncluttered, and that gives you space for an “objective” or “summary” at the top.
WRITING YOUR OBJECTIVE
At the very top of your template, you’ll have a short objective that summarizes what you are presenting to the application readers. This should be 1-3 sentences, and it will identify a few aspects of who you are and what you want to accomplish that relate directly to your academic intentions. For example, an objective could read:
Passionate student-scientist seeking a dual major in biology and geology at a major research university with field research opportunities, with the goal of pursuing a career in climate change research focused on how desert ecology is being impacted by rising surface temperatures.
You may be asking, “but don’t I say this same type of thing all over my application already?” Yes, you do. But the resume isn’t about introducing new information. Instead, it’s a hyper-curated cheat sheet. It’s you, distilled down to the core aspects of who you are as an applicant.
EDUCATION
After your objective, you’ll list your high school, the location of your school (city, state/province, and country), your GPA if applicable, and up to 3 honors or awards given to you by your school that are related — even loosely — to your academic path.
If you’ve taken classes at a community college, studied abroad, or spent time at any other school, you should include that here as well.
EXPERIENCES: EDUCATIONAL AND EXTRACURRICULAR
This is the meat of your resume and will be broken into two sections: Educational Experiences and Extracurricular Experiences. Each section should include 3-5 items that relate to your proposed course of study, and should be formatted as follows (tweaked as needed to fit your resume template):
Role/Job (ex. Intern), Company/Location/Program Name — Summer 2022
Six-week-long full-time internship working in the data processing department assisting with inputting new incoming data from collection sites around the globe and correcting errors from previous inputs. Data was then compiled and used to draw conclusions about sea level rise and glacial melt in key geographies.
Educational Experiences should be classes, workshops, academic summer camps, or other experiences that are explicitly education-first.
Extracurricular Experiences include internships, jobs, volunteer experiences, and other experiences that are related to your proposed major but not run through your school and are not explicitly education-first.
ADDITIONAL SKILLS
After you’ve written up your educational and extracurricular experiences, you may have space to include 2-4 additional skills. This is only included if you have room. Your resume must be one page, so if you’re already close to one page you may not have room for this. Not having room for this section is okay, but if you’re already over one page you’ll need to edit the earlier sections down to get your resume onto one side of one page in size 12 font with some semblance of margins.
Examples of additional skills relevant to our fictional future climate change researcher are:
Trained in Excel
Experienced Hiker
Certified Open Water Lifeguard
FINAL THOUGHTS
Up above we mentioned the idea of your resume being one page. In case you missed it, we want to reiterate it here: your resume must be no more than one page. This may sound arbitrary — and it sort of is — but take it on as a challenge. Your resume is a cheat sheet, not ‘cheat sheets.’ That may mean leaving off the “Additional Skills” section, slimming down your descriptions, or even narrowing your margins a tad. If you’ve done all of that and it still isn’t working, consider switching to another template with a smaller header or less ‘buffer’ between sections to better accommodate all the awesome things you’re trying to include.
Writing your college resume may seem like a hassle, but it’s a crucial part of your college application process and will set you apart from the pack.
If you’re in the weeds of your college application and feeling overwhelmed, send us an email. We help students like you get into the most prestigious colleges and universities in the United States.