The College Freshman Guide To Creating A Strong Resume

1. First Things First: Know That Your Resume Is Not About You

Before we get into how you should make your resume, let’s set things straight: Your resume is not about you.

Believe it or not, your resume is not about you. It’s about you showing how you’ll benefit the person you hand it to. How exactly are you going to be an asset? It a snapshot of how you’ll be able to help someone else.

Why would someone feel the need to hire you?

A resume is about selling someone why you’re the best person to help them, or that company.

Speaking of selling, let’s take a quick lesson from classic advertising:

Keep the following acronym in mind when making your resume: A-I-D-A

What does that stand for?

A- Attention: On average, you’ll have 6 seconds to get a recruiters attention. How are you going to do it with your resume?

I — Interest: Once you have their attention, how are you going to keep them reading the next line after the next? (Hint: it has to tell a story)

D — Desire: While a recruiter is reading your resume, what’s going to make them feel the desire to pick you?

A — Action: Provide a clear way for a recruiter to get into contact with you and set up an interview.

2. Your First Draft

Every first draft should be a rough draft. For the first draft of your resume, you’re going to want to list out everything you can think of.

List out every activity you’ve ever been apart of, every course you’ve ever taken, and every skill you think you have. This should be way more than one page.

Try to write out every number, verb, and context of all of your experiences. You should be writing way more then you’d ever share with someone else.

Brainstorm! Here’s are some things to think about when going through your past experiences: education, employment, activities, volunteer experiences, projects, unique skills, and leadership roles.

Once you go through the rest of this list — check out this post on how to better narrow down your first draft.

3. Formatting, Styling, and Design

Luckily, we built resumeruby.com to automatically design and format your resume for you (for the most part). Just select the theme that is built for your situation and customize it.

You’re still going to have to make a couple of choices, though:

Bullets vs. Paragraphs:

Bullets are traditionally a better choice to clearly show what you’ve accomplished in a concise way. As you learn to become a clear writer and can tell a strong story on your resume, you may think about switching over to a paragraph format.

The Order Of Your Sections:

Typically, you’ll want your freshman resume to look like this:

1. Education Section

• Coursework is typically a good idea to include in STEM fields
• GPA — include your GPA if you have above a 3.0 (although there are many cases where this can change)

2. Relevant Experience

• This could include leadership experience, work experiences, research experience, or something else depending on your context.
• It might be necessary to have multiple sections of “relevant experiences” (like leadership and research)

3. Skills / Honors / Projects

4. Activities / Interests

What about objectives or references?

Objectives are a good idea if you’re posting your resume out on the internet or into some system in where you don’t know who might come across your resume. If you do have an object on some versions of your resume make sure in only provides non-obvious information.

When you’re applying to a job directly, you should leave off your objective statement and references. Do not include the line “references available upon request” either — that’s implied.

4. Do’s and Do Not’s

Here are a couple of Do’s/Do Not’s to keep in mind as a freshman:

Do:

1. Answer the question: Who is my audience?
2. Write out everything you’ve ever done
3. Design your resume on your own, but use one of our themes to help format and design it.
4. List categories in order of how important they are to the person reading it.
5. Describe responsibilities using keywords and short sentence fragments.

Do Not:

1. Don’t stretch the truth.
2. Don’t leave any spelling errors, unclear writing, or grammar mistakes unchecked
3. Don’t copy someone else’s resume. You have your own unique experiences and selling points.
4. Don’t be afraid to ask for others to review your resume.
5. Don’t use a generic Microsoft Word resume template.

5. Hitting The Bullseye

Check Out Our Advanced Checklist on how to craft your resume to try and win a specific job or opportunity.

You should never send out the same resume to everyone, and our advanced checklist walks through how to narrow in your first draft into a resume that will get you the interview.

6. Taking The Next Steps:

• Check out this freshman example from the Princeton University Career Center
• Build your key career assets — a master resume, personal portfolio, and strong social media presence

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Published By Nametag.