Helping lower division engineering students develop a good resume

Many students need a good resume in their first year of engineering. Most students have a high school resume complete with all of their awards, music and athletic accomplishments, but now they need an "engineering" resume for an internship, a scholarship, or a research position in engineering. The resume can also serve as an excellent career-planning tool, establishing a framework on which to build and a guideline for gap analysis. Creating this new resume is difficult for most students. They need help translating and prioritizing their previous experiences into "skills" that are useful in engineering. With the help of a Career Services representative, who is in close contact with what industry wants on a resume, and the director/mentor of academic scholarship programs, who follows through to make sure that the students write good resumes, lower division students are able to develop excellent resumes. Since checking resumes can be a tedious task, a Resume Checklist was created to empower the students to develop their own good resumes and to show them when revision was needed. This paper will include the main suggestions for a resume given by a Career Services representative, the Checklist, and an evaluation of this Checklist activity. The paper will also include an explanation of how a good resume can serve as a career-planning tool.