All About Resume Writing

What is a resume? 

A resume is a one- to two-page document that outlines your most relevant qualifications and experience for a specific career path or job. These qualifications and experience can include paid work, volunteer and internship experience, coursework and course projects, extracurricular activities, study abroad, skills, and educational background. 

Why do I need a resume? The resume lets you showcase your most relevant skills and experience to potential employers, who use resumes to decide which applicants to interview.

What does my resume need to accomplish? Your resume should highlight your most relevant and impressive skills and experience for a specific job or career path. This relevant experience should leap to the reader’s eye when they skim the resume. The resume should also be concise, with no fluff.  

What should I do before drafting my resume?

  • Brainstorm a list of all your experience and skills, including degrees, course projects, research and fieldwork, internships, jobs, student organizations, and volunteering and community service. For a longer list of categories to use, visit the Career Services website Create a Resume page.
  • Learn about the experience, qualifications, and skills that are valuable in the career you are interested in.
  • From the list you brainstormed, identify the most relevant experience, qualifications, and skills to include in the resume.
  • Learn the keywords that machine and human readers will look for in a resume in your field.
  • Look at model resumes in your field. Career Services is one source of these models. 

What sections do I need in my resume?

Contact Info

  • All resumes should include contact information so that an employer can get in touch with you to offer you a job or an interview. Make sure all your contact information is current.

  • Include a city and state, a phone number, Web portfolio URL (if applicable), e-mail address. A full US mailing address is optional.

  • Consider establishing a “work” e-mail address for yourself if your current e-mail is something like crazyforcats@gmail.com or starchaser91@yahoo.com. Try firstname.lastname@gmail.com or a similar professional-sounding address. 

Education

  • Include names and levels of any degrees you have earned or are in the process of earning, names of majors and minors, names of institution(s) where you earned the degree(s), dates of graduation (or expected date)—month and year.
  • GPA is optional; don’t use if under 3.0. 
  • Optional: Relevant courses, course projects, capstones, theses, or academic honors may be included in this section. 

Relevant Experience

  • List information for each relevant job, internship, or volunteer experience.   
    This can be a single section (e.g. “Relevant Experience”) or two sections (e.g. “Project Management Experience” and “Leadership Experience” or “Editorial Experience” and “Additional Experience”).
  • Unless the section is specifically labeled “Work Experience,” you can include different kinds of experience (paid, volunteer, leadership, etc.) in the relevant experience section(s).
  • The items in each experience section should be in reverse chronological order (most recent first)
  • Include the name of each company/organization, its location (city and state), the dates you worked there (month and year), your position title, and your job responsibilities and achievements
  • Label blocks in this section by company name or by position. Use the category you want readers to notice.  

Skills

  • Computer software proficiency (Microsoft Excel, Adobe Photoshop, etc.)
  • Languages 
  • Gen AI platforms/tools - Employers, especially those in technology and business, are beginning to expect to see these skills on resumes. List the AI platform/tool and the tasks you use it for (e.g. “Canva MagicDesign & Beehiiv for design, content creation, and marketing automation”) 
  • Job-specific skills (copy editing and photography for a journalism job or computer languages, skills, hardware knowledge for a computer science job or CPR certification for a nursing job) 

Optional Sections

Objective

  • An objective statement is helpful if your experience and skills don’t clearly indicate the career field you are interested in (e.g. if you are changing careers) or if you are not applying for a specific position (e.g. at a job fair)
  • The objective should be short and concise, but it must also be tailored to the specific career field or type of job.   

Honors and Awards

  • Dean’s list, department awards, scholarships, off-campus awards, contests
  • Keep these connected to what you’re applying for: don’t include the hot dog-eating contest you won (unless you’re applying for a job eating hot dogs!).

Other Optional Sections

  • Volunteer experience and activities

  • Leadership experience

  • Research experience

  • Relevant coursework

  • Publications

  • Certifications

  • Foreign travel/study abroad experience

  • Professional organizations

  • Honors organizations membership

What order should I use for the sections? 

The order of sections can depend on your major field of study, the profession you are entering, or the time you have spent in the career field. 

  • General principle: Order your sections so that relevant, impressive qualifications show up on the top half of the page.
  • For new graduates, the Education section is placed at the top, right after contact info. If you have been working in the field for several years, however, Education may appear at the bottom.
  • In the technical fields, the Skills section may come before the Experience section(s). For other fields, it may come after. 
  • See sample resumes in your field for more guidance on the order of sections. 

How should I describe my experience?

Descriptions of experience are provided as “accomplishment statements” in bulleted lists, with concise, telegraphic, active, prose.  

  • Use action verbs 
  • Incorporate keywords from the position description specifically and from the industry generally
  • Be concise, but don’t use abbreviations (e.g. Mgr. instead of Manager)
  • Highlight transferable skills, especially when describing less relevant jobs (e.g. teamwork, communication, leadership, problem-solving, organization) 
  • Quantify your accomplishments (e.g. Ensured safety of 200+ patrons per day; Increased customer satisfaction by 40%) 

How should my resume be formatted?

The Golden Rule of resume design is making it easy to read by both humans and machines.  Avoid clutter and make things easy to find. Start with what’s most important and work down from there.  

  • Most resumes for new college graduates are no longer than one page. If yours goes to two pages, make sure the most relevant, impressive information is on the top half of the first page.
  • Your name and contact info should always appear at the top of the page, but not in the header (where machine readers can miss it)
  • Use white space between sections
  • To accommodate machine readers: 
    • Use single-column format and avoid tables or charts
    • Use one to two readable fonts
    • Use standard round bullets
    • Avoid pictures and logos
    • Avoid underlining
    • Save as a PDF or Word document

Should I use gen AI in my resume-writing process?

  • If an employer instructs or advises applicants not to use gen AI for application materials, do not use it.
  • Multiple gen AI prompts using the same job ad can produce very similar, generic output. Employers notice this similarity in resumes and cover letters across applicants.
  • If you use gen AI for your resume or cover letter, use it well. This means crafting specific prompts, revising AI output for accuracy, personalizing it for content and voice, and getting feedback from a human reader. If a reader can tell you've used AI, you haven't used it well.

Additional resources