“How have you never made a resume before?”

I have been asked this somewhat brazen question numerous times by fellow peers.

I’ve been an after-school teaching assistant, a camp counselor, and a barista, but none of those applications required a formal resume. I went back to my dorm room later that night, consumed with a new sense of panic and humiliation. All my peers seemed to be talking about their fancy LinkedIn head-shot photos, and how they just nailed an interview with a prestigious tech firm, and here I was, without even a resume to my name.

I called my mom (which is what I tend to do in times of personal crisis) and explainedthat I needed to make a resume—a seemingly simple task—in order to begin my summer internship search, yet I was overwhelmed and wasn’t sure where to begin. Do I use an online template? Do I format it based off my friend’s resume? Do I include experience from high school? I can sometimes be a perfectionist, so I didn’t want to start the resume until I knew I was doing it the right way. After professing my anxieties to my mom, she reassured me that she would be happy to help me over break. Coincidently, she had just been looking for a new job about a year ago, so resumes and interviews were fresh in her mind. In addition to offering her expertise, my mom also suggested I visit Scripps’ Career Planning and Resource Center

Heeding my mom’s advice, I made an appointment with CP&R. I marked the appointment on my calendar, eager to finally have an initial resume so I could begin applying for jobs and internships over winter break. Unfortunately, my appointment slipped my mind, and I missed it entirely. It was a really busy time in the semester, and I guess I had just spaced out (it happens to the best of us, right? I was utterly convinced that if I scheduled another appointment, everyone at CP&R would somehow remember me as “the girl who was disorganized and forgot about her appointment,”  and proceed to typecast me as unprofessional and flaky. Even though this type of thinking is super illogical, it’s what I thought.) 

Thanks brain for coming to illogical conclusions yet again.

Nevertheless, I made another appointment, determined to use it as motivation and encouragement to finally start internship searching.

The next week, I made my way to Seal Court, and met with Niah, CP&R’s career counselor and student-employment  coordinator. She was very friendly and helpful, and suggested that I look at the online Scripps College Resume Book to get some ideas of how I wanted to format my resume. It had never occurred to me that Scripps might keep copies of senior and alumni resumes. I was overjoyed that all I had to do was view the resume book, and pick a format or two I liked that could serve as my foundation.

Over break, I poured through the resume book, intrigued at the array of diverse majors, experiences, and activities that Scripps students had engaged in. It was really useful to see what majors corresponded to which careers. There were students who had gone into careers in various sectors, including education, law, finance, tech, medicine, environmental sustainability, marketing, and everything in between.

I picked a format that I found visually appealing, and then started writing. After completing a draft, I began the editing process, making sure to find any inconsistencies in grammar, punctuation, or format. This process took longer than one would expect for a page of writing. When most of us read things, we don’t read every single word, but rather skim, and let our brains fill in the rest of the information; thus, it was really easy to leave out a word or period. Once I finally had a pretty solid draft, I felt relieved to have completed a tiny step in my job and internship search process.

Dividing academic and personal goals into small, manageable chunks is always less overwhelming for me than trying to sit down and finish a resume, cover-letter, and three applications all in one day. In terms of work-habits, I’m more of a “marathoner,” rather than a “sprinter;” I like to work on things steadily over a long period of time rather than in intermittent bursts.So even though all I had done was type some words in a document and call it a “resume,” I was proud of myself for finishing an important step that would make subsequent tasks much easier. Now that I had a resume, I was ready to begin the next step…the internship search.

In my next blog entry I will delve into my process of searching for summer internships, and what I learned along the way.