A good high school resume can make a really important impression on your colleges when you start sending off applications this fall. With many top-notch universities, resumes are one of the only ways besides your essays they can figure out what differentiates one straight-A student from another. Think of it as your calling card; it gives the college a taste of who you are, what you do, and what makes you tick, letting them take a peek past that uninformative transcript to see whether you’d be a good candidate for their school. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of material available on the web to tell you how to write a good college resume. Everyone has different advice – resumes should never be more than a page, resumes should be as long as they have to be – and it’s difficult to figure out what exactly should be on one, how it should look, and what you even use it for. So! Let’s begin to figure out how exactly you should go about making a resume.
To start with, you’ll need to grab some paper and a pen and sit down for a brainstorming session. If, like myself, you weren’t one of those people who kept a resume during high school, just start trying to think up any club you may have ever visited, any event you ever participated in, and any award or honor you may have ever been given or won, and write it all down. Obviously you’re going to get some stuff you’ll think is worthless, but write it all down anyway. Try to put a year (9, 10, 11, 12) on each one; if it helps, see if you saved any old assignment notebooks and read through the margins to see if there’s anything there to jog your memory. My favorite method of coming up with things to write about was pulling out all the big boxes of keepsakes my mother had saved every year, which helped me remember all those random awards and honors I had gotten over the years that I’d forgotten about. As a rule of thumb, don’t bother mentioning anything from middle school unless it’s something you’re still doing (e.g., Girl Scouts for seven years, flute for six years, or the like). I suppose if it were something really important from middle school, like winning the national science fair, or such, you could work it in. When trying to come up with events for your resume, remember that old Beatles song – “I get by with a little help from my friends.” Chances are your friends will have done a lot of the same activities as you, and you can check your lists against each others’ to see if there’s anything you forgot.
Now that you've come up with all of your activities, the next step is to find some way to make all this data comprehensible to your colleges. There are a myriad of variations from which you can pick when organizing a resume, but there are generally a few common sections included in all of them. First off you have to introduce yourself somehow, which should cover the basics: name, school, location, class rank, standardized test scores, and G.P.A. The first three criteria can be covered in a header at the top of the page; I put the others into a section right under it called “Rankings”. I’ve seen it called “By The Numbers,” “Education,” and more; all that matters is you get that information somewhere near the top of the first page. If you’ve taken other tests or have other numbers you think are relevant, feel free to include those as well. The next section is the meat-and-potatoes of your resume: activities. Separate your activities into themes and place them by relative importance. Put activities you’ve done for four years at the top and if you’ve got a bunch of disparate things like “State Music Contest” and “Pep Band,” just lump them together under a heading like “Band” or “Trumpet” or the like. When it comes to explaining activities, if the event or group isn’t one an average Joe would recognize, you should probably give it a line or two letting the reader know what kind of a group it is. Underneath each major club, if you can, list a few actual activities you participated in; if it’s a community service club, mention a few fundraisers or benefits you helped with; if it’s a musical instrument, mention trips, contests, or benefit concerts. I think it goes without saying that if you played an active leadership role in running an event or a club, point it out in some way to the reader. You should also have a section for awards you’ve won; be sure to mention if an award is national, state, or regional to provide context. If it was a competitive award, make sure to delineate some of the requirements or criteria, as well as numbers of applicants. You want to paint yourself in the best light here, so don’t omit crucial information to show how coveted an award was. “Volunteering” and “Jobs / Employment” should both be sections, and employment is especially important if you held a job during the school year, since that sucks up a bunch of your time. In that case, I would make sure to mention how much you worked a week if it was a lot. When it comes to listing hours, my advice is that if it makes your level of involvement look impressive, such as being able to say you volunteered for 40 hours of independent service to the old folk’s home, definitely do so. If you don’t have that many hours to your name, this is probably a case where less is more; let admissions readers assume what they will about your level of involvement. The last section you might want to add, although this one’s not mandatory, is one on interests or hobbies. The advantage to such a section is if there’s something you’ve devoted considerable time to that hasn’t fallen under one of the previous categories, you can work it in here. From my own experience, I had wanted to include a little bit about photography and graphic design since they’re something I’ve devoted quite a bit of time to; I then put them in this section since they didn’t fall under any of the others. I also included a “Life Experience” category, since I lived abroad as a child and thought it was something important enough in shaping who I am that it should be mentioned. If you have any particular events you want to include, don’t be confined by these categories; there is no “Chicago Manual of High School Resume Style” to run afoul of, by any means.
When you finally have all the information written on your resume that you want to be there, you’re still not finished yet! Now you’ve got to go in and tweak what you’ve written to make it presentable. In my own experience, a page covered in small black font isn’t terribly readable; break it up by putting important positions or awards in bold so your reader knows what to focus on and what they really need to look at. You don’t want your most important achievements lost amidst some of the distracting less-important ones. (Of course, you want at least some of those distracters on there just in case something strikes the reader’s eye. I went through four or five in-person interviews, and it was always a different section of my resume that caught the interviewer’s eye. You never know what someone might be interested in.) This brings up the question of length. While it’s true that for most professional resumes most people advise no more than a page, my school’s college counselor talked to a college admissions reader who told him that it doesn’t matter how long your resume is (within reason of course), and that they prefer to see everything you’ve done rather than the highlights. A good length is probably two to three pages; no longer, for sure. Also, you’ll want to put the years you participated in an activity or the year you received an award off to the right after you list it like this: Concert Orchestra (9). If it’s two years, put a comma, like (10, 11); three or more, put a dash (10-12). For each club you have individual events listed under, put time labels on those too. When you’re proofreading your resume, don’t forget to check for parallelism! Parallelism is hopefully something your language arts teachers have already taught you, but just in case you’ve forgotten, it’s the method of making items in a bulleted list the same form, or parallel. For example, if you want to say that one year you sold baked goods, another you were involved in helping set up stands, and the next you supervised the set-up, you would start them with parallel verbs: “Sold baked goods; set up stands; supervised set-up.” You wouldn’t say “Baked good sale; set up stands; supervised set-up,” because “baked goods sale” is a noun, and the other two start with verbs. While we’re talking about the look of the page, let’s talk fonts. The most important thing with fonts is readability. Your font choice should promote comprehensibility, rather than prevent it. So no crazy heading fonts you have to spend ten minutes trying to decode! While this obviously isn’t intended to be a dissertation on typography, one small distinction should help you when picking out fonts to use. There are two main types of standard fonts: serif, and sans serif. Sans serif just means there aren’t any accents on the ends of each letter; Arial and Comic Sans are two popular sans serif fonts. Examples of serif fonts are Times New Roman and Garamond, which have accented edges. The importance of this distinction is just that when mixing fonts, it’s best to choose one from each group, rather than two serif fonts or two sans serif fonts. For example, on my resume I used Copperplate Gothic Light (a serif) for my headings, and the sans serif Candara for my body text. In fact, that’s a tip that will make anything look more professional, not just your resume. So moving on to overall layout, I strongly advise you to have some sort of organization, like bars or lines breaking up the different sections. Color is okay to use in resumes, just not over the top – like don’t make every section’s body text a different color! The most tedious part of putting my resume together was the formatting. You’ll need two versions of your resume: a printable version that you can physically hand to people, and a Common App compatible version. I uploaded my resume under the “supplementary materials” section on the Common App essay page, and the problem I ran into was that once you load it, all your page breaks and formatting goes wonky. So save another copy of your print version and play around with it via trial and error until it looks good on the website as an uploaded file. This isn’t totally necessary, of course, but it makes your overall presentation to each college much nicer looking. When formatting your print copy, make sure single bullets don’t hang over onto another page; try to resize the margins so it’s obvious what bullets go with what sections. Just play around with the margins and font sizes until you find something that looks good.
So before I wrap this up, I wanted to say a quick note on the use of this resume you just spent so much time putting together. Obviously, you’ll want to include it on your applications; the Common App has a file upload spot where you can attach supplementary materials, and that’s where most people put their resume. While the Common App does have a section of its own for activities, it’s not comprehensive and you have barely any room to elaborate on your extracurricular activities, so it's definitely worth the effort to attach your own resume. Other than that, I advise always keeping one on hand when meeting a college interviewer or a college representative visiting your school. For interviews, it offers a good jumping-off point if the interviewer doesn’t have any specific questions they need to ask you, and it helps them get a quick picture of you as an individual. Of course, some colleges request you not bring anything to your interview, so in that case it would obviously be a bad idea. When meeting a college rep, it’s good to have one on hand, since if you hit it off with the rep you can always slip it to them at the end of the meeting to hang on to so they’ll remember you. In cases like this, it might not a bad idea to put a small picture at the top so they’ll remember who you are a month later if they happen to look back at it. Finally, these resumes are instrumental in getting good recommendations. The process for requesting recommendations and tips for how to get good ones is another whole subject for discussion, but your recommender often won’t know you outside of whatever subject they teach, and so having a resume will help them give a more glowing, balanced review of you as a student by showing them what else besides their class you were juggling throughout the year.
So it should be pretty clear by now a resume is an incredibly important part of your college admission toolkit, and one to which you should definitely give some thought. It should be one of the first things you get done while preparing for applications, and should be something you keep updated as the year goes on with things like G.P.A. changes and new awards. Your resume is a versatile, useful asset to have in your college application process, so get started on it as soon as you can!
