Hello, I am a senior currently working on my resume. I have looked at examples of resumes and decided to organize my resume in four parts - education, experience, activities, and honors/awards.
I am currently struggling with filling out the experience part as I have never had a job or internship. I have not attended any camps or programs as well.
However, I have attended a few math and computer science competitions. I did not place in them so I didn’t put them under honors/awards. Could I mention them under experience instead?
If a section is not applicable to you leave it off your resume.
You don’t need a resume unless a college specifies that you should include one. Your app contains virtually the same info.
I am creating a resume for rec letters
@happy1 would it look bad if I have no experiences listed though?
That won’t be an issue – the people who write your LOR will focus on what you HAVE done not what you haven’t done. Just so you know there is no one single accepted format for a resume. The categories can/should be tailored to the person who writes it – if you don’t have any work experience you just don’t need a category for it.
FWIW unless a person specifically asked for it, you probably don’t need a formal resume to give to people writing recommendation letters – I think a list of academic achievements and activities would suffice.
I agree. The LOR is supposed to be written by someone who knows you reasonably well. If your English teacher is writing one, I don’t see a need to give that teacher non-relevant info about your science experiments, as an example. Did these teachers request a resume?
Remember the goal of the LOR: it’s to give colleges an insight to your character. Ideally, your teacher has had enough interaction with you to know about your character. It’s fine to give them a cheat sheet if they are happy to have one, but I personally don’t think a formal resume is necessary. My D simply asked two teachers for recs and never gave them any additional info at all. She did very well in the admissions process.
Actually, for top college applicants creating a resume is quite common. Schools like Columbia/UPenn even invite applicants to submit one thru common app. Resumes can serve several purposes in this process, a) to highlight your accomplishment for your recommenders. b) to streamline your material and narrative for common apps ECs/awards/essays. b) to introduce yourself to interviewers before meeting them.
But for applying to most public flagships and LACs a resume probably is not needed.
Agree with @jzducol that having a “resume” is handy. Many non-Common App schools also ask for a resume or something like it. So will the occasional interviewer. Also if OP is a student at a large public high school, it is very likely the counselor will want/need additional info on the applicant that is not transcript based.
As to the OP’s original question, don’t force items into categories. I don’t think anyone would think twice about seeing a resume that was organized around Academics, Activities (you can put the competitions there, especially if you were on a school team) and Awards.
While the awards and academics are part of the LOR, @Lindagaf hit it on the head at least in the second paragraph. I made sure my daughter told her recommenders to concentrate on her character attributes versus any awards or things she had done. The LORs came out much better and more personal that way, this is especially important when you go to a public school and the recommenders may not be that familiar with writing an outstanding LOR. Both of her recommenders asked for a resume, and to me that is a red flag, as the LOR can come out looking a lot like the resume which isn’t very helpful since most of your resume is already in the app.