Resumes (Pre & Post) Admissions
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Ellipsing My Way...To Business School is my first hand account of the b-school application process through the eyes of a prospective applicant. |
I was just chatting with my friend (who used to just be a blog reader but we’ve met a couple times in person and he’s now a friend) who goes to Haas. He was telling me how he was working on his resume and how different it was from the one he submitted for his Haas application. I thought about it and agreed with him. I went through the same thing last year.
It’s so funny because I remember spending soooo much time on my resume and just making sure it was perfect for my application. Then I got to school and my resume was essentially ripped apart, in a good way of course. It wasn’t ripped apart by our career center but rather by my 2nd years. Here at Johnson we have these things called Career Work Groups (CWGs).
Pretty simple concept actually… let’s PRETEND that I was 1st year who wanted to do investment banking. I would be put in a group with 5/6 other 1st years who always wanted to do investment banking. The group would be led by two 2nd years who just completed their investment banking internships. We would then meet each week and go over different topics to prepare us for recruiting. One of those topics that ALL CWGs discuss are resumes. I am not a CWG leader but some of my 2nd yr classmates are and I saw the same red marks on the 1st year resumes that I had on mine last year.
I remember getting my resume back from one of my 2nd years CWG leaders and saying to myself “How is this possible?” But, the corrections were warranted, for sure! I’m thankful that they did that. Now when I see prospective students’ resumes I cringe at most of them because I’ve been “trained” to see them differently now. This is not to say that the business school format is the end all be all in formatting and I see that some people have trouble with it, but that’s just the way it is.
Here are three quick tips that I have for you all out there. If some of these seem obvious, trust me, they’re not because not everyone does it.
1. ONE-PAGE (end of story)
2. Education goes at the bottom of the page, unless you’ve JUST completed Undergrad or a Masters program.
3. Don’t list your daily duties, list the outcomes of those duties. For instance:
- WRONG = …worked with X team in planning Y.
- CORRECT= ….worked with X team in planning Y, which increased of X for the month.
