Career Services 101: Tackling the Experience Portion of the Resume

Ever feel that sense of overwhelming dread when you’re about to tackle something BIG?  It’s that feeling you get right before you’re about to attack that massive pile of homework, study for a crazy 50-page test, or stand up in front of 200 people to do a presentation.  It’s scary, right?  And right before you’re about to meet that challenge head-on, whatever it may be, the biggest question that’s probably floating around in your head is, “How in the world do I even begin?”
    For a lot of us, between school, extracurriculars, and sleep, it’s difficult to find that time that’s required to pull off a stellar resume.  On top of everything else that we juggle as full-time students, it seems like such overwhelming, hard work, and sometimes, to be honest, writing a resume can be quite like pulling teeth.  Especially when you get to that intimidating section called “Experience”.  For some, it seems impossible to be able to summarize their experience in one to two pages, and for others, it’s a struggle even filling up half a page with resume-worthy examples.  If either of these scenarios sounds like you, then you’ve definitely come to the right place!  The following tips are designed to help you combat those anxieties when you finally get to sitting down and writing your resume.

 

One Peer Educator’s Exploration:

This is something that happened to me quite recently. I was sitting in my environmental psychology class and became really interested in learning more about this field. So I decided to Google it and found many websites talking about the potential careers in environmental psychology. And then this one article really caught my attention –a new field called design psychology. After I read about this newly emerging field I thought to myself “This is it. I want to do this as a career.” I started to do more research but since it is still a relatively new field I couldn’t find much information on it. But I did find a number of prominent individuals, who started this field and contacted them via email and received helpful replies from them. I also talked to the career counsellors at Career Services and was introduced to a staff member at Queen’s Plant Services who is involved with the interior design and spatial planning at Queen’s. Meeting with her and having an
information interview was extremely helpful as she was able to tell me more about the different jobs within the field of design and potential contacts.
What I found through this whole experience is that there are so many different careers out there that many of us just don’t know about yet. Even if you know the area you want to get into, ask around and see if you can meet someone for an information interview –don’t underestimate the amount of information and advice you can receive from people who are already in the field. Start by researching the field you are interested in — through the information centre at Career Services or on the internet and contact people who are doing what you love to do. I bet they can tell you about a possible position within that field that you had no idea existed!

Good luck!               ~ Yayoi, Peer Career Educator

 

Say What? What else besides school?

Earlier today, as I was in the information area on the third floor of Gordon hall, an interesting thought occurred to me… well, interesting in the resume-writing-obsession type of sense. What does a resume really say about you?… i.e. When you put all the effort into writing a clean, polished resume, tailored to its job description so creepily well that the employer starts asking people around the office whether or not they’ve been talking to you… When you put all that effort in, what kind of information do you end up conveying? Your first thought might be, “Well, everything about myself.” – but that is highly unlikely. You probably give a thorough account of your past work experience (the relevant stuff, of course..), perhaps your extracurricular involvement, and of course flaunt the fact that you are a Queen’s student (which there is nothing wrong with). Now if I was asked to describe myself to you and I had gone through all that, I suspect you would have one big nagging question and would be highly disappointed that I hadn’t answered it. “What do you do with your LEISURE TIME??” Now let’s talk about what kind of answer I should give you, and why it would be a good question to answer on your resume.