Alumni Career Services

Here are some thought starters to help you develop each section of your resume.

Basic Information

Include your:

• Name as you want to be referred to professionally (Jon Baker, Jonathon Baker, Jon E. Baker).
• Current address and phone number with area code (where you can be reached now!). If you will be moving during your job search, include a permanent address and phone number of someone who will know how to reach you (e.g., a family address).
• Email address.

Objective

A clear objective is critical to resume development because it helps focus and select information. Although you may wish to make your objective broad, do not make it so broad that it says nothing. If you are pursuing employment in more than one field, simply create different objectives for each field.

Your career objective should answer this question, "What do I want to do?" Is it for graduate school, a part-time job, an internship, a professional position after graduation, a scholarship? Make sure your objective makes this clear.

Some sample objectives are:

• Research position in biochemical laboratory
• Position teaching science or social studies at the secondary school level
• Editorial or research assistant in a public affairs organization
• Acceptance to College Student Personnel Administration graduate program 
• Internship position to explore career options in the health field
• Summer job in the field of physical therapy

Educational Background

For each degree-conferring institution, include:

• The institution's name and location (city, state)
• Your graduation date
• The degree or certification obtained
• Your major/minor/emphasis area and any areas of concentration 
• Your GPA (if you are proud of it)
• Any additional certification or licensure
• Relevant coursework
• Specialized instruction
  
  

Experience

This part of your resume may include several sections such as work experience, volunteer experience (internships, community service, student teaching), campus leadership, and any area in which you may have significant experience, such as publications/presentations or knowledge. You may divide this between Career Related Experience and Other Work Experience.

Briefly describe for each position, including

• Job title, dates, organization name, location
• Your responsibilities for each position using a variety of action words to describe situations and achievements
• Unless necessary, avoid little words in description such as “a”, “an”, “the.”
• Include scope of responsibility such as: Trained eight student workers
• Concretely outline any outstanding results such as: Developed new computerized customer listing using MS Access software to improve output by ten percent

Honors/Activities/Leadership/Special Skills

Front load these with those most important or most pertinent to your objective (career goal). You may want to use specific headings such as professional organizations, computer skills and leadership positions. Include any honors, scholarships or recognition awards that you have received. If you were actively involved in any clubs, teams or committees while in college, those may be included also. The key to this section is keeping it brief. If you feel you need more detail, use the guidelines for Experience and make it a complete section.

Interests

The trend is to keep away from any extraneous information that does not clearly connect to your career goal. However, if you are applying for a position in which you have experience through a hobby or leisure activity, you may want to consider adding it to your resume. For example, if you are applying for a forest ranger position and you enjoy hiking in the wilderness, include it by stating: Skilled in all-terrain hiking, camping and navigating. What you need to ask yourself is, "Will this information help the potential employer learn more about how well I can do the job?" If your answer is yes, then be sure to include the information.

Polishing It Up

After you get all your information down on paper, go through and decide which experiences are directly related to your objective, which are definitely not related, and which are questionable. The questionable information can be used only if there is room. Otherwise stick with the directly related experiences.

The key to a successful job or graduate school search is to communicate with the person who has the ability to hire or admit. Therefore, your cover letter is extremely important. Effective cover letters convey a sense of purpose, project enthusiasm for the position or program and demonstrate your knowledge of the employer or graduate program’s goals and needs.

Many times individuals will spend hours writing a "perfect" resume and very little time writing a quality cover letter. Remember that your cover letter not only accompanies your resume, it is usually on top of your resume when the envelope is opened. A positive first impression requires that your cover letter be neat and concise, containing no errors in spelling or grammar. Each cover letter should be customized to fit the position for which you are applying.

You will want to customize your cover letter depending on its purpose. Some reasons for sending a cover letter may be:

• A result of a direct search
• A response to an advertisement
• A follow up on a contact made through networking

No matter what your reason for sending a cover letter, be sure it contains:

• Return address with the date
• Name, title, organization, and address of the person you are writing

First Paragraph

• State purpose of letter
• Catch attention
• Indicate your interest in the position or company
• Flatter your audience by using company/ program information found through research

Second Paragraph

• Explain how your background makes you a qualified candidate
• Give an example, talk about a specific project, accomplishment, or service
• Highlight information found in the resume

Third Paragraph

• Refer the reader to your enclosures (resume, reference, examples of work)

Final Paragraph

• Indicate your intentions for follow-up
• Repeat a number where you may be reached

Closing

• Salutation
• Signature

February 6, 20XX

Jonathon Saunders
Save Our Children
1212 33rd Street, Suite #1
Bloomington, DE 80080

Dear Mr. Saunders:

I am writing in reference to the Program Coordinator position (NY-02) listed recently on the AmeriCorps website. This position appeals to me because of my strong interest in service as a career, assisting to create a positive environment for all members of a community. I believe this position would allow me to use the skills I have learned through my internship and psychology program. In turn, I would gain additional skills as I help develop a strong program at Save Our Children. Save Our Children's mission, to serve all children through care, love and support, describes exactly the kind of environment I am seeking.

In May 20XX, I will graduate from the University of Dayton with my bachelor of science degree in psychology. Some strengths of mine include being self-motivated, organized, and able to work with a variety of people. As psychology student, I am often required to do group projects allowing me to be a part of a productive team. I enjoy working with people in order to complete a common goal. My internship as a youth care worker gave me the opportunity to do this with a team of professionals. We often worked in groups to strategize new, more effective ways to work with each client. This team approach taught me to see things from different perspectives while learning new ways to help my clients achieve independence and attain goals. In addition, I am able to successfully maintain a good grade point average while remaining involved as a campus leader. These skills, combined with my educational background in psychology, make me an ideal candidate for this Program Coordinator position.

Enclosed please find a current copy of my resume. If you should have any questions regarding how my skills fit with your organization, please give me a call at 937-xxx-xxxx. I may also be reached by email at Flyerfan@notes.udayton.edu. Thank you for considering me for this position. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,
Fanny Flyer

Graduate students earning master's degrees go about the job search in a very similar manner to a student graduating with a bachelor's degree. The candidate must prepare a professional resume and cover letter, practice interviewing skills and do a thorough job search.

For master's candidates going into areas other than teaching, health care or social work, a one or two page resume works best. Graduate candidates may want to prepare a resume with a "profile" section instead of an "Objective" depending on their background and present career path. Depending on the amount of experience a graduate candidate has, he or she may still want to prepare a one-page resume as many recruiters in the business world prefer one page. However, two pages is quite acceptable as long as there is ample information to fill most of two pages and none of the information is redundant.

For master's or doctoral candidates going into teaching, health care or social work and other areas such as research, a CV (curriculum vita) should be prepared instead of a resume. A CV is a longer version of a resume that includes much more information such as teaching competencies, publications, seminars or workshops presented at, conferences attended, pro bono activities, etc.

Despite their venerable name, curriculum vitae are simply a specific sort of resume, the style preferred by candidates for medical, academic, teaching, and research positions. Most of these candidates have an educational background directly related to the positions they seek, so education is always featured first. Even after 20 years of research, your degrees and the schools where you earned them will overshadow your experience.

The main differences between general resumes and CVs are:

• CVs almost never list an objective, and seldom have a long narrative profile. They are sometimes diagrammatic, giving exceptionally brief listings for each experience. Your credentials and preparation will have to speak for themselves. If you want to make a more elaborate argument for your candidacy, you must do it in your cover letter.
• CVs should look rather plain. When they are nondiagrammatic, CVs can contain blocky job descriptions of some great length—but the emphasis is always on content, not form.
• Name dropping is more common in CV's than in resumes. If you performed research under a certain professor, you would probably list only her title in a business resume, but a CV would most likely include her name. Science and academe are small worlds, and it is likely that a prospective employer will have heard of a given specialist in her own field. Similarly, if you went on clinical rotations at a given hospital, name it: your future employer might have hospital privileges there.
• Unlike resumes, CV's can run on for pages and pages. They should, however, be very neatly organized, with clear headings and distinct conceptual division, so that they can be skimmed as easily as a two-page resume.
• In addition to the usual catalog of degrees and job histories, CV's often contain many more categories of information. Experience may be divided between headings for TEACHING and RESEARCH; education may be divided between DEGREES and CONTINUING EDUCATION or ADVANCED TRAINING; publications may be divided into subcategories of BOOKS, ARTICLES, CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS, ABSTRACTS, BOOK REVIEWS and UNPUBLISHED PAPERS. How you organize this material determines its impact on your reader.

Scour Your Background for Evidence to Present

As with technical resumes, employers get clues about your intelligence and focus from the way you organize and present your CV data. Your presentation will be judged largely on the number and nature of listings. Material that you may think of as irrelevant may end up clinching your presentation. If you gave fourteen lectures in the last year, don't say, "but that's obvious." List them! Make them interesting!

When you have published dozens of books and journal articles you can afford to skip the obvious; when you are fresh out of school it is better to let the search committee know exactly what you have done and, by inference, what you can do. For example, citing your doctorate in nonverbal communication establishes your basic credentials, but listing lectures like the following is a much more effective way to give the search committee a feeling for who you are as a person and an intellectual.

As with any other resume, review your total universe of material before deciding what to
include, what to feature and what to omit. After compiling this raw data, present your background in the most compelling order and format for your targeted reader.

One last note: Bibliographies longer than two pages, or any other category with more than two pages of information, should be separated from the main body of the CV. Of course, different disciplines have different protocols for bibliographic data and you will need to learn and follow those for your profession. Bibliographies used to be assembled in chronological order, so that the author could add new data to the bottom with a typewriter, but with the advent of computers, bibliographies should run in reverse chronological order like everything else (as a general rule).

Thank You Letters

Always send a thank you letter. Often it may be the difference between getting an offer or not. If an employer has two equally skilled potential employees who both fit with the organization, receiving a professional thank you letter may tip the scales in one’s favor. A thank you letter is also a place for you to reiterate your skills or to mention something you may have forgotten or hadn’t had the chance to speak about.

Formatting Suggestions

Timing is critical! This letter should always be sent within 24 hours after the interview. There are three ways to send a thank you:

• A typed thank you letter using letterhead that matches your resume heading
• A handwritten note using a professional notecard or thank you card.
• An email thank you.

Regardless of the method you select, send a thank you letter to every person with whom you interviewed; otherwise, send it to the chair of the screening committee. This letter is to express appreciation, reiterate your interest in the position, and to further sell yourself and your skills as they relate to the position specifically.

Advice for Letters Sent Electronically

• Scanning: If the company uses an applicant tracking system, prepare a scannable cover letter and resume.
• Internet: Send your cover letter and resume in the body of one email message. The subject line is a valuable tool. Use it for the position title.

The Stall Letter

Upon occasion, candidates find that they must respond to a job offer before they are ready to make a decision. This letter should be written only when you are seriously considering the offer. Let the employer know that you are interested in the position and explain briefly why you cannot make a decision at this time. State a specific date by which you will be able to announce your plans with certainty. It is not ethical to accept an offer and keep looking.

Withdrawal Letter

It is a matter of common courtesy to notify an employer once you have made a definite decision to withdraw from consideration or to reject an offer of employment. Rejecting an employment offer should be done thoughtfully. You never know who the employer might know and whether you might want to apply for a different position at that organization in the future. Indicate that you have carefully considered the offer and have decided not to accept it. It is not necessary to give a long explanation. Thank him or her for the offer and confidence in you.

Acceptance Letter

This letter is written to accept a formal job offer and is probably the most exciting letter of all to write. Confirm the terms of your employment, including starting date, salary, etc. Express your appreciation for the opportunity and enthusiasm in beginning employment.

March 4, 20XX

Ms. Jane Jones
Personnel Manager
ABC Agency
500 Fortune Avenue
Corporate, USA 12565-9876

Dear Ms. Jones:

Thank you for talking with me last Thursday about the possibility of a Lab Technician position with the ABC Company. I was excited about the interview but became even more enthusiastic about the position when you mentioned that research for an AIDS cure would be part of the responsibilities of the position.

As you may recall, I enjoy conducting experiments and finding alternative methods of solving problems. College courses of biology and chemistry magnified this interest. Furthermore, my work experience at Children’s Hospital Medical Center provided practical application of laboratory testing and research and gave me growth-producing responsibility. All should prove to be of value in early productivity within the position.

I look forward to hearing from you by March 18, as you mentioned. If, in the meantime, you have any further questions, please call me at 937-229-xxxx.

Sincerely,

Grace J. Goodwin