A Guide to Building Your Resume While You’re in University

By Aidan

Published in

YouAlberta

6 min readAug 19, 2019

So you’re in university now.

Maybe you just started, maybe you’ve been here for a while. But in any case, you’re probably here under the pretense that going to university will lead to a better life, often in the form of better career prospects. That’s how this works, right?

The good news is that is how it works! (Mostly.)

The bad news is that at the end of the day, a university degree is only going to take up about this much space on your resume:

Yikes, that’s quite a bit of open real estate.

Building your resume beyond just your degree is valuable not just in terms of making yourself more appealing to prospective employers, but also developing important skills and worldviews you’ll need to excel in the workforce.

But we’ve all heard this song and dance before. How is volunteering at a soup kitchen or joining the chess club supposed to prepare you for anything relevant to your desired careers anyway?

This cynicism is not unfounded, and my usual response is “you should try to find opportunities that are relevant to your field,” to which most students will laugh me out of the room because of how few opportunities in their field there allegedly are, and the ones that are available they don’t remotely qualify for.

But the catch-22 of “needing experience for the position, but also needing the position for experience” is not as binding as it appears. So let’s look at a few tangible ways you can start to build your resume while you’re in university.

Note: there will be a cache of links for all the resources I mention at the end.

Take Relevant Courses

Finding courses that fit your goals is a fantastic double-whammy — you get to build your resume while doing schoolwork.

Your mileage may vary here depending on what program(s) you’re in, how much flexibility you are afforded by your degree requirements, and what your life/career goals are.

“But all you can take in university is Shakespeare and calculus and stuff!” I hear you say.

To which I reply:

The U of A offers a variety of interdisciplinary, niche, and downright bizarre courses — you just have to look for them. Become an expert in navigating the course catalogue, a master tracker on Beartracks, and a savant of seeking out new classes being offered in future terms.

And if that doesn’t work, you can always try to find someone in your faculty who can supervise a directed reading course for you. Directed reading courses let you do a deep dive into a subject you and your supervisor decide on together, often culminating in a research paper or term project. Totally worth doing if you’ve got a passion for something the current course catalogue can’t quite satisfy.

Volunteer*

*Smartly.

I get that you want to be paid for your time, and that some volunteer opportunities can be seen as just exploiting you for free labor.

But alas, not all volunteer opportunities are created equal!

While purely community-oriented volunteering opportunities have their merit, it is also important to find opportunities that give you a chance to learn, develop, and demonstrate your skills.

Volunteer opportunities can include but are not limited to:

Doing research in your faculty.
Write for a school publication (like The Gateway) .
Become a faculty councilor.
Help organize a conference.
Become an executive in a student club.
Job shadow someone in your desired field.
Volunteer with the university, city, or province.
Join a General Faculties Council committee or appeal board.
Start your own project.
Enrol in the Emerging Leaders Program.

Volunteer opportunities can be a little trickier to track down than courses, but (cliche incoming) they can teach you things you just can’t learn in school.

Ask your peers and mentors if they know of anything you could help with, be open to trying new things, and don’t feel bad leaving a volunteer gig you feel like you’re not getting what you want out of. It’s volunteer work. What are they going to do? Fire you?

Get a Job/Internship

This one is easier said than done, but you have a few things tilted in your favor as a university student.

Being in university gives you the opportunity to network and get in the inside lane on positions that you otherwise might not have been considered for.
Some job postings only consider student candidates. (Many of which you can find online at the U of A Career Centre).

And while they’re is some truth to that comic above, remember that job postings are describing what their ideal candidate for the position might look like. It’s not uncommon to see job postings like this:

Odds are you won’t meet all of the job’s requirements, but neither are employers expecting you to. At the end of the day, most employers are looking for smart, capable people who can learn quickly and effectively problem solve. Of course if they put that in their job requirements, then they’d be getting applications from anyone who’s ever solved a Sudoku. So go ahead and apply for that job you’re pretty sure you’d be great at, even if you can’t check off ever single qualification.

Unfortunately, all of this will go to waste if you don’t know how to write an effective cover letter, format your resume professionally, and just generally be comfortable with selling yourself.

I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of this today, but rest assured there are plenty of resources available to help you with this. You can start with our articles 6 Tips to Get Your Summer Job and Preparing to Graduate: Next Steps and Job Tips, attend one of the free seminars put on by the U of A Career Centre, or book a personal advising appointment.

And Remember:

Don’t just do these things for your resume. Do it to be a better you. Do it so you learn what you’re actually good at, and what you actually like doing.

Because at the end of day, all going to the university will do by itself is make you an expert on being a student.

Resources:

Relevant Courses:

Volunteer:

Jobs/Internships: