Hi guys, I had a question for those of you who transfer from a 2 year to a 4 year college with your EC being almost entirely made up of work experience.
But first a little background, and I should give fair warning that it’s a bit of a sob story.
I’m currently a 3.7GPA student at the Peralta Colleges system in CA (SF Bay Area). I graduated high school in 2011, was accepted to SFSU (local preference) and began attending, only to be rescinded several weeks afterwards because SFSU A&R wouldn’t let me fix a PE credit that didn’t transfer from my first high school (hooray). As a result, I got pretty depressed, did poorly in (or dropped) all my college courses at community college, and subsequently dropped out entirely in 2013. At around the same time this was happening, I moved out of my parents house in the summer of 2012, and began working to pay for my own room in an apartment with friends. Once I dropped out entirely, I began working full time, which became pretty necessary as good housing in the berkeley area got more and more expensive.
I’ve been working full time for years, continuing when I re-joined community college again (in 2015), and have been doing well. However, I’m going to be writing applications hoping to transfer into a 4 year college, and I was hoping for suggestions about how to frame this whole thing, and to make it clear that work was an above-adequate substitution for typical ECs.
My resume (short version):
Several years as the assistant to CEO of a Real Estate Investment company (my stepfathers)
Then I worked as the shift lead in the warehouse of a food delivery company until they went out of business.
Now, I work as the A/P assistant in a company that owns about 40 gas stations in the bay area, and I deal with accounting, compliance, permitting, and some HR assistance.
I feel as though my relevant work experience to my finance major is very noteworthy, and makes me a valuable applicant because not a lot of people my age have been fortunate enough to land jobs that aren’t just at starbucks or your local grocery store. I’m just hoping somebody can offer some advice as how to best frame it in personal essays, etc. Should I be mailing my real resume to all schools, should I be asking my employers for recs to supplement my professors’ recommendations? If you have any questions feel free to ask me. I worry about this pretty much every day, and it helps to bounce ideas off other people.