COLLEGE ADMISSIONS RESUME GUIDANCE

When applying to college it is important to communicate to every institution all of your extracurricular activities, awards, and experiences in sufficient detail. Unfortunately, the Common App does not provide enough space for a detailed description of these parts of your background.

As a result, it is imperative that students submit either a college admissions resume or an activity sheet (also known as a brag sheet). Below is our college admissions resume guidance and a summary of how to compose a college admissions resume.

The college admissions resume is supposed to be a list of your extracurricular activities, work experience, and awards. However, it is different from a standard work resume in the following important ways:

1. The listing of activities does not need to be chronological.
2. The college admissions resume must reinforce the overall narrative of your college application.

As such, it is important to list your activities and work experience in the order most beneficial to the overall narrative of your college application. Therefore make sure to list the activities and work most related to your intended major and field of study at the top of the college admissions resume, while listing the rest of your activities further down.

Here is a breakdown of how your college admissions resume should look:

 

Heading: State your full name, address, phone number and email.

Education: Identify your high school, your weighted and unweighted GPA, your class rank, and your SAT/ACT test scores.

Activities and Work Experience: List all of your community service, work, and other activities in 9th, 10th, and 11th grades. Be descriptive! Make sure to specify what you did and any accomplishments you achieved.
Also, specify when you were involved in these activities/jobs.

Honors and Awards: List of awards you earned in 9th, 10th, and 11th grades. Specify the reason for the award and the grade when you received it.

Hobbies and Interests: Specify your hobbies and interests that would reinforce the overall narrative of your college application. Don't include hobbies and interests that would make you look immature, closed-minded, or anti-social.

The ideal length of a college admissions resume is one page. College admissions officers have only about 15 minutes to look over your application, so you want to be able to summarize your activities and jobs in a way that would allow the admissions officers to consume this information in a short period of time.

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