Brainstorming

• List all your academic, employment, extracurricular, and volunteer activities—everything is potentially useful. Don’t worry about length in this stage; list everything!
• Think of the specific skills these experiences can convey to an employer.
• The more detailed and result-oriented you can be, the easier it will be to transfer this information to your resume effectively.
• If your experience is modest, focus on your education: major projects, papers, labs, presentations, or international experience.

Initial Draft

• Write first; edit second. Don’t try to do both simultaneously. Just get everything you plan to include on your resume in the order that you want. Rule of thumb: Use the most recent four years for your resume, unless you have older relevant and significant experience for that job.
• Organize the relevant information from your list in a reverse-chronological order.
• List your job title, the name of employer, city, state, and dates where/when you were employed, and a concise description of the outcomes of your work. More important than passive descriptions of the work or projects you carried out, are the results you achieved by working on them. Focus on accomplishments.

Targeting and Formatting

• Tailor your résumé to the specific job or internship for which you are applying.
• Use strong action verbs to indicate your accomplishments and avoid passive phrases like “Responsibilities included” or “Duties were.”
• Be succinct, non-repetitive, and truthful.
• Use numbers! How many students did you supervise? How many programs do you implement per term? How much data did you analyze? How long was the paper?
• Put yourself in the shoes of the employer: what does their job posting, literature, or website say they look for? Use the employer’s language where appropriate to make it clear that you meet their specifications.
• Select a professional-looking font that is sized from 10 to 12 point. Use multiple fonts only if they look good together and don’t overwhelm the reader’s eye.
• • Generally, serif fonts (such as Times New Roman, Garamond, Palatino, and Bookman) are considered to be more readable on a printed page than sans serif fonts (such as Arial, Helvetica, or Verdana).
• Organize and focus the reader’s attention using headlines, a change in font size, italics, bold print, spacing, bullets, and indentation for emphasis and impact, but don’t overdo it!
• Be consistent.
• Your formatting should make your strengths stand out clearly and be appealing to the eye.
• No mistakes. No mistakes. No mistakes.

Final Steps

• Proofread, proofread, proofread! Have another pair of eyes take a look at your résumé. Use a friend, the Writing Center, or the Career Center. Don’t rely on automatic spelling and grammar checkers. A single misspelling can eliminate you from hiring consideration! Really.
• Looks Matter. If you are mailing your résumé, you can purchase some quality bond paper at a nominal cost from the Career Center for printing your resume and cover letter.

Key Points for avoiding a boring résumé

• Adjectives/Attributes: what do I get admired/praised/noticed for?
• Imagine your reader asking "So what?" 
• Be clear: What did you do? What did you learn? What were the outcomes? What can you do for me?