Polish your resume

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You have worked on improving your resume all semester.  Now it is time to create and hand in your most polished version yet. 

Read this first

• 2018-09-18 NYT Scheiber N = Facebook Accused of Allowing Bias Against Women in Job Ads.pdf

Complete these steps

1. Contextualize it.  Imagine a job, internship, volunteer, or research position you are likely to apply for in the near future.  Keep this example in mind as you polish your resume.  You should always revise your resume before you use it to apply for any job, to make sure the information you include is relevant and persuasive to that specific organization.

2. Revise it.  Tailor your resume for the job that you have in mind, in a way that links your experiences ("wanderings"), strengths (StrengthsFinder), and accomplishments (in the form of CAR statements) to the specific demands of the job.  Think about how what you put in this resume explains, complements, or contextualizes your choice of undergraduate major -- remember your undergraduate major does not "speak for itself" and you need to be able to use your resume to tell a story about what you learned in college and why.

3. Review it.  Look for clichéd terms ("Self-starter") or hyperbolic phrases ("Amazing") to eliminte and rewrite. For example, read the following handouts for ideas:

• CareerBuilder's "Best and Worst Words to Use in a Résumé" (2014)
• SuccessWorks handout: Anatomy of a bullet point
• SuccessWorks handout: Writing descriptive lines

4. Reformat it.  Think about how to add some visual interest to your resume. This could be as simple as adding a bit of color, or making sure that the fonts you use all match -- or it could be more elaborate, like creating an infographic to illustrate (and quantify) one of your accomplishments. Review the following articles for ideas:

• Hannah Morgan, "Creating your own infographic resume," The Infographic Resume (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014).
• Hannah Morgan, "Resumes with visual flair," The Infographic Resume (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014).

5. Proofread it.  Proofread your resume closely, and ask someone else to proofread it as well, striving for zero errors. (Remember to keep your resume to a maximum of two pages.)

6. Proofread it again.  We really can't stress this enough.

7. Turn it in.  Upload your revised resume to Canvas to complete this assignment.   The resume that you turn in for this assignment must be an edited improvement on the resume you turned in at the beginning of the term.  If you turn in exactly the same resume for this assignment as you did at the beginning of the term, you will receive zero points for this assignment.

About this assignment

• Review the SuccessWorks handout: How to write a resume
• Advisers at SuccessWorks will be happy to answer questions about finalizing your resume.  
• Unfortunately, some prospective employers may merely skim your resume, applying the filter of their own assumptions, narrow life experiences, and even biases, focusing on one or two bits of information rather than seeing the total narrative of value that you have so carefully tried to construct.  What kinds of preconceptions might someone might bring -- consciously or not -- to your own resume?  What can (or should) you do to try to avoid this?
• Remember that you should always target both your resume and your cover letter to a specific job or opportunity (though you should keep a generic "master" resume that you can edit as needed).
• Also remember that there is no single, perfect, universal way to construct a resume -- you will likely get conflicting advice from people as you show them your draft resume (you may even get differing advice from various SuccessWorks advisers).  That's to be expected -- the point is that you have to be comfortable with how your resume represents you, after understanding how a wide variety of different readers might interpret it.
• Columbia University has put some good resume resources online, including What NOT to do in a resume, A corrected resume, and a Liberal arts and sciences resume.
• The CareerLocker service has plenty of resume tools under their "Job Seeking" tab (free access through your MyUW page).  
• You might also check out the BadgerStudents page on building your resume.

• How much has your resume changed from its original format when the course began?
• How you might alter this resume if you were targeting a different kind of job, or if you were submitting it to a generic online resume library?
• Try this peer-review exercise: Trade resumes with a partner and review each other's work for style, organization, and content issues.  What's missing from the resume?  What should be made more prominent?  What should be made more consistent (eg. spacing, capitalization, tense of verbs)?
• Try this role-playing exercise: Pair up with another student and trade resumes.  Taking turns, pretend to interview each other for a job, asking your partner about one specific point on their resume that might be intriguing or unclear, so make sure that each student has a story in mind (part of an overall career narrative) to accompany everything listed on the resume.  You might also ask how any particular point relates to the student's major, or to the student's career goal.

To learn more

• Taking Initiative Student Guide chapter 09, "Diversity, inclusion, and creativity."
• Katharine Brooks, You Majored in What? chapter 8, "Your wanderings on one page."
• Lauren A. Rivera, "The paper," in Pedigree: How elite students get elite jobs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).  This scholar researched how three elite law and consulting firms screen the resumes of candidates from Ivy League schools, and found that preexisting biases play a large part in hiring decisions.
• Richard N. Bolles, "Google is your new resume," in What Color is Your Parachute? 2015 edition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2014). This is a chapter from a well-known, best-selling career guide that has been continuously published (and updated) since 1970.