If you are a high school student getting ready for college or an undergrad getting ready for graduate school, then you can never start preparing your education resume too soon. Really, a college resume is generally used for high school students but really, anyone applying to a college or university needs one. What information you include and how you present it can have a tremendous effect on your future. It is the way you make your first impression with some very important people at the institutions of your choice.
After all, everyone from assistants to the dean of your chosen field to the dean of admissions to your future adviser will be seeing your education resume. It will give them all their first idea about who you are. If you present them with a badly written, poorly organized resume which is too long or too short, well, that can all be very telling. Do you want something like that to be your first impression? Excuses will not work; for instance, you may not get the chance to explain that you are better at math and science than you are at writing.
So, what is an education resume, exactly? By all accounts, it is simply a college resume, but it is especially well suited to those seeking an educated related degree. Just as you will later submit a CV and a resume to potential employers, it is the way you introduce yourself to the admissions department of the college or university you want to attend. While it is not the place to list all the activities in your school and community in which you have been involve, it is where you highlight all the accomplishments you have attained during your high school years. Given how competitive the wide world of college acceptance is these days, you can understand why it is so important to create a good resume.
This is not like a typical functional or chronological resume, though you do begin with the heading. Like a regular resume, it contains your personal information: name, address, et cetera. Generally, you should include your social security number rather than your phone number or email address – at least that used to be the case. Especially if you are uncomfortable with the idea, check with a particular institution to see what their preferences are. Usually, this is really a specification geared more towards high school students applying for college rather than those applying to graduate schools.
Following the heading of your education resume, you need to talk about your education. This section needs to be incredibly detailed, from including the name and address of your previous institution to your GPA – but only if it is a 3.0 or above. In the final section, you list your activities, which is the main reason for doing this type of college resume. You especially want to include community and high school activities.