The Top 5 List!

Five Common Résumé-Writing Mistakes

Hey, all! The summer job and internship application crunch is in full press, and we at the CDO have been hard at work helping with the ever-necessary (and ever-confusing) résumé. We’ve noticed that the problems in most people’s first drafts tend to be pretty much the same. Here for your résumé reworking convenience are some of the most common, and how to correct them:

#1: Inconsistency
Résumés should be nothing if not orderly. To make sure they don’t come off seeming thrown together willy-nilly, make sure all information of the same type is presented in the same way. For instance, if you’ve formatted your “Education” section with relevant dates along the right margin, put them there for the other sections as well, unless you have a very, very good reason not to. This is a simple change that will make your résumé that much more readable and clear.

#2: Order of Sections
On a résumé, it’s important that the most important information is most readily accessible to the reader. How else to make it more accessible than to put it above everything else? Almost always for a college student, the best order is:
(Objective, if you choose to include one) – Education – Work Experience – Honors and Activities – Skills

#3: Order of Information
In listing their prior or current job experience or activities, many people order by default in chronological order. This is the right idea. As we’ve said before, however, it’s important to present the most important information first, and since the summer internship you had last year (or the campus job you have now) is more important than your 7th grade paper route, you should list your points in reverse chronological order.

#4: Information Elaboration
The idea for the little bulletpoints underneath each summer job or club is this: To give as much pertinent information as possible in as flattering way as possible in the shortest way possible. Some signs that your elaborations could use improving:

· A bulletpoint runs on for more than two lines of text

· There are more than four points for a single activity

· There is boring language like “Took care of kids” (“Supervised and cared for children ages X to Y,” perhaps?)

· The points are in different tenses (“Supervised children” vs. “Delivering newspapers” vs. “To serve food to customers.”)

#5: Addresses (yes, plural)
Especially among freshman, I have noticed many résumé-writers have been leaving their Vassar addresses off of their résumé. It’s important that you include that – for most of us, it’s a more reliable address to reach us at than our home addresses. Ideally, your campus address should match up with your home address at the top of the page, on the opposite margin. And don’t forget to label one “Home” and the other “Campus.”

As you are thinking about and writing your resume, feel free to stop into the CDO to sit down with one of us (the Career Assistants) to help you with the development of your resume. Once you've had it reviewed by a Career Assistant and would like a counselor to look at it, you can call for an appointment or come in for a drop-in.

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