Demographics |
Objective |
Education |
Skills |
Experience |
References |
Appearance |
Final Thoughts
For students in the early part of their academic careers, experience is invaluable.
Seek externship and internship opportunities or look for
part-time student worker positions on campus that will allow you to gain interpersonal and office skills.
Volunteer in offices that offer the opportunity to gain experience related to your career goals. The Career Center is well connected to the Aggie Network and can help you identify people working in your fields of interest. These Former Students can provide guidance, advice and most importantly, suggestions as to where you can get relevant experience.
You can gain excellent experience in a variety of settings. For those students who
lack paid work experience, participating in other activities, both in and out of the classroom, can often provide a great deal of information for the resume. Be sure you include the following:
- Full-time, part-time, internships, or co-op jobs.
- Volunteer experiences that have provided you with specific responsibilities.
- Student organizations that required a significant time commitment.
- Extracurricular or academic projects. This is helpful if you do not have enough of these experiences to create a separate leadership section.
Begin with your
most recent or relevant experience. Most resumes list experience in reverse chronological order. However, a student may have worked in a position more relevant to the current position being sought earlier in his career. In this case, the more relevant experience can be listed before the most recent experience. Include company or organization name, city and state of location, your job title, and dates of employment. For example:
GenenCom, Houston, Texas
Intern, Summer 2006
For undergraduates,
place the date after the job title to put the focus more on the experience itself rather than how long you were in the position. Dates should be listed on the right hand side, not the left.
Duties/Responsibilities
Describe your duties using phrases beginning with
action verbs in present or past tense, depending on the time of the experience. Focus on
transferable skills more than mundane daily tasks when describing your duties. If you desire to go into public relations, customer service, problem solving and communication should be emphasized far more than faxing, filing and answering the phone. For example, for someone who has served as a waiter, do not list Served food as a responsibility. Most recruiters will assume this. However, you may have worked in a very busy restaurant and had to effectively manage multiple tables and tasks. You may have built a repeat client base that requested you each time they returned to the restaurant. You may have consistently sold above the average ticket price because you suggested additional food items. Each of these reflects higher order skills such as consolidating tasks to provide more effective customer service, effective communication and customer service skills to build a base of clients, and effective sales skills.
Quantify whenever possible. If you were a lifeguard, typically how many pool patrons were you responsible for during each shift? If you trained new employees, on average, how many did you train? If you helped organize a canned food drive, how many cans did you collect? For those students just beginning this process, recording this information somewhere, perhaps in a journal, database, or AggiE-folio journal will help you strengthen your resume. We all can forget specific details or outcomes of our actions. Record what you actually did and list any quantifiable results so you can include these on your resume. Do not repeat the same duties in each entry. Try to
find different responsibilities for each job that you have had.
Multiple Experiences in the Same Field
If you have served in the same position multiple times, for example, as a lifeguard at various pools, try to combine these experiences into one listing as there is no reason to list them all separately unless you had ever increasing responsibilities with each job. For example:
Briarcrest Pool Center/Harris Aquatic Center, Bryan/Houston, Texas
Lifeguard, Summers 2003-2006
Leadership and Activities
Look for ways to
become more involved in student organizations. It is more important to be active in a few groups than to simply just belong to many groups. Recruiters place value on quality not quantity. Look for an organization related to your fields of interest. Include campus chapters of national and professional organizations as these can help you build your network and may provide opportunities to gain relevant experience.
List those activities in which you have some type of leadership position first. When listing a student organization on your resume, be sure you include the following:
- Title of the organization and its location
- Dates of membership
- Any position that you held. Leadership positions do not only mean those that are elected. A leadership position might also include a committee chair, an event coordinator, etc.
- Duties or responsibilities that you had within the group. Remember to quantify whenever possible. If you were responsible for the groups fundraiser, how much money did you raise?
If a group is not well known, you can include a very brief statement describing the organizations purpose. However, recruiters are much more interested in what you do within the group than the group itself. For example:
Big Event Community-wide Service Project, Texas A&M University
Site Coordinator, Spring 2006
- Met with and assessed the needs of homeowners participating in the event
- Organized and procured tools needed to carry out projects at the home
- Supervised team of 6 students at the event site
Some groups and positions at Texas A&M can be difficult to describe, which is why we have advisors available each day to review your resume with you. An example of such a position within an organization is Fish Camp Counselor. When listing this on your resume, remember that Fish Camp may be only a four-day event, however, you prepare for it for almost a year. It involves a competitive application and interview process in order to be selected. You create programming when you develop skits. You build relationships quickly when interacting with the students in you DG (Discussion Group) and you maintain those relationships over time. These are all valuable transferable skills to recruiters.
