How good a piece of paper can represent you?

There is never a limit for modifying your resume and make it look and sound better. When you first start college, there is not too much to put on this one piece of paper and reading upperclassmen’s resumes might be a scary experience. Seeing the projects they did and the internships they had might discourage you and you might start thinking the employers will never give me a chance when there is all these upperclassmen out there, but that’s not true! There is a significant amount of freshmen and sophomores that get internship offers, one of the key things that help them is how good their resume look.

There are two main things to worry about when writing a resume: The format and the content. Presenting the resume information in a way that catches the eye and easy to read is crucial. The employers look over hundreds and thousand of resumes and they only spend 1 minute on each paper, so you only have 60 seconds to catch an employers attention and impress them with your accomplishments. Creating only a one page document which will do most of the work for you to get an internship sounds crazy? You don’t know where to start from? It’s not that complicated!

The CDC has various handouts on resume writing both on the front side of the CDC office and on Jobfinder under shortcuts. Follow those instructions to create a resume and get it critiqued by a CDC employee. The CDC employees know what exactly the employers are looking for, so they can tell you any weak points in your resume in less than 15 minutes! If you don’t have enough time stop by during a walk-in hour between Tuesday-Thursday 1-4 pm to get a resume critiqued in 15 minutes or schedule an appointment with a CDC employee to have a more detailed overview.

You would be surprised how many things you can modify in your resume to make it look better. I had my resume critiqued last week, and although I went through this process numerous times before it was still very helpful, because the information you put on the resume changes. You add your summer internship or IQP project on there, take out your high school experiences and sometimes you can’t decide which information to keep and which one to leave out. CDC is the best resource to help you reshape your resume or clarify things for you if the resume you wrote was your first trial. If you want to get an internship this summer and need a head start, make sure to write a resume and get it critiqued at CDC 😉 Remember, that one piece of paper will be the first thing that shows employers that you’re a good fit for what they are looking for.

Evy