Ok, so resumes and essays probably sound like death. But think of it this way: a resume is a way for you to brag about how cool you are (in a snapshot), and an essay is a way to expand on your greatness! :)
Resumes
You will be asked to provide a resume for some college and scholarship applications. If they don't ask for it, don't send it, but if it is optional, go ahead and provide it. Why not give them more reason to pick you? It shows that you are professional and go the extra mile. A resume will also be helpful when you want to apply for a job.
To start out:
The top of your resume needs your personal information. Your name (you can include middle initial if you want) goes first, followed by address, phone number (home or cell or both, if you have room, but designate which is which), and email address. Note: make a professional-sounding email. You can make a free email address at gmail.com or other free sites and then have those emails sent to your normal email account, if you want. I'd highly recommend making one now, not only for your resume, but for more official correspondence. If you are emailing an admissions counselor at the college you really really want to go to, you'd probably rather use janedoe@gmail.com than twilightfreak@gmail.com. :)
So here's what you want the header to look like:
Jane Doe
123 Somewhere Road
Someplace, CA 12345
(123) 456-7890 - janedoe@gmail.com
After this heading comes the meat of the resume:
Some people include an intention or objective at the top, telling what kind of job for which they are looking. I personally did not want this in my college and scholarship resume, since it seemed tacky to me to have "Objective - to earn this scholarship" or "to gain admission to this college," but you could use it on a job resume, as in "Objective - to gain a sales position at Payless ShoeSource."
Ok, here's what you have to have:
First comes education.
Include your recent school and dates attended, when you will graduate and the type of diploma you will receive (if you have that option). You can also include your cumulative GPA.
Next, you can list any other schools you have attended for high school ONLY.
Now you'll include your honors, awards, and memberships:
--Awards, honors, and special recognitions (but please, high school only; I don't think they care if you won the sixth-grade spelling bee, unless it was the Scripps National Spelling Bee.) If it was a very very special award, you can go back farther, but you might consider mentioning it in your essay if you can't fit it in your resume and it meant a lot to you.
--Memberships in any special honor societies (Spanish Honor Society, National Beta Club, etc). And I know, lots of people get invited to the National Society of High School Scholars, but honestly, you just pay sixty dollars for the title. It won't really do anything for you, but if you want to include it, go for it.
--Volunteer work: Colleges and scholarship foundations LOVE to hear that you have volunteered. Again, try to keep it to ninth grade and up, unless you started it earlier. For example, if you've been volunteering at the soup kitchen since you were in seventh grade, list that. Even if you stopped in the tenth grade, it's still worthwhile. I suggest keeping a notebook and writing down your volunteer hours. List date, start and end times, what you did, and with whom (by yourself, with a church or school group, etc). This will help you in your resume writing (some scholarships ask for how many hours you have participated in each activity).
Try to have consecutive items of volunteer work, such as working at the library one day a week or doing several things with your youth group. You could also include mission trips; I included a week-long trip to help rebuild in the Gulf Coast.
--Clubs. These can be school-sponsored or community groups. Include any positions of leadership you may have held.
--Sports. These can include school teams and recreational league teams. Include years and any leadership positions.
--Church groups. Youth group membership, choir or musical group, or teaching a Sunday School class or Bible study are all things you can add. Showing that you can be committed to a group is helpful to the committee reading your resume.
--Internships. If you can get one (especially in a field that you'd like to pursue), great! Ask around - your best bet at finding a mentor is probably through a friend of a friend. You could also ask at your school if they have any kind of program that matches you to a mentor. Include name of company, dates of internship, and a brief description of what you did.
You may consider asking your mentor if you can put some kind of contact info for them on your resume or list them as a reference.
--Job experience. This includes paid work such as babysitting, petsitting, and yard work, preferably if it was a steady job. You should include title of job, dates (month/year to month/year), and a brief job description. If it is for a more formal job (e.g. customer service in a store), you can list the name of the store.
--Other important and relevant information. Did you do something great, like starting your own business or running a charity? If it is something big, you might want to put it in your essay, but you can always mention it in your resume.
Other things I didn't include in my resume, but you might want to:
--Special skills: foreign language proficiency, computer proficiency and certifications (if not listed above), etc. This is another thing that is more for job applications, but you could consider it. You could also include talents such as playing piano for 8 years or something like that, but make sure it is relevant to what you are applying for.
--References (especially on job applications): You could write "available upon request" or have them on a separate sheet attached to the resume. However, make sure you actually have all your references lined up, so that you can list them. DO NOT list a reference without speaking to him or her about it!
Ok, so once you have all this info, you are going to have to compact it. In every resume-building class I have had, one major note was this: your resume needs to be ONE PAGE LONG. You can play with margins, play with font size (but don't go under size ten), and change font to an extent (but probably Times New Roman is your best bet). I ended up with really strange margins (like 0.3 inch) and compacting all my information a lot.
So here's how my resume was set up. You are welcome to modify it to make it look how you want and to save space.
header
-----
education
high school
month/year to month/year
graduation month/year, type of diploma
gpa:___
honors, awards, and memberships
list of honors, awards, memberships, etc. and years of induction or award
experience
(i listed my internship here, but you don't have to do this)
volunteer work
organization name
job title - dates - job description
school and community organizations
advisory council
name of position, dates
club
name of position(s), dates, job description
*********************************************************************
Wow, that was a lot of information. Now for even more!
ESSAYS!!! (eek!)
Just kidding; I don't think essays are as scary as they may seem. At the beginning of my senior year, my English teacher had us research a few colleges to which we wanted to apply and find out what kind of essays they wanted. Many colleges will ask for a personal statement (don't worry, we'll get to that), while others are more specific, asking several questions or having a question that seems totally random (for example, a few years ago the University of Virginia asked students to describe an invention or creation from the past that was important to them).
My number one piece of advice is to...commit this to memory...SAVE EVERYTHING!!! Save all your essays, even little drafts that you later want to get rid of, even a paragraph that you start to delete because it is over the limit, EVERYTHING! It probably sounds crazy, but all you have to do is cut and paste it into a word file and save it somewhere else. Then, when you are stumped for inspiration on an essay, you can go back and read the other stuff that, for whatever reason, didn't quite make the cut.
Another reason to save everything is that you will probably be able to recycle essays. I know that I had one essay that I modified and used for - I'm not kidding - probably 15 different applications. It was a really good essay, but it was also really versatile. It was about my internship, which was in the field I want to pursue in college and which I also qualified as volunteer work. That way, I could use it in major-specific scholarship applications, scholarships based on volunteer work, and general scholarship applications. I also combined it with some information about my leadership in organizations, so that I could use it for a leadership and volunteer work-based scholarship. And I saved each different mutation of the essay under the name of the scholarship for which I used it. That way, if I had a question just like another I'd had earlier, I could go back and find it. It might seem like a lot of bother, but you'll find it saves you time and brainpower when you don't have to write so many essays!
That essay was one that I originally wrote for a scholarship. It was a good essay because it started out with a quote that drew the reader in: "Do you like chicken nuggets?"
I went on to explain that I was asked this question by a little boy whom I was tutoring during my internship. We had a silly conversation before working on his math work, and I was able to bond with him and encourage him specifically. From there, I wrote about my love of teaching and learning, and how I wanted to inspire children. Finally, I closed my essay by saying, "I will try to always remember the little things that matter...even chicken nuggets." I modified the middle of this essay several times, but I kept the storyline, the beginning and ending with the chicken nuggets, intact. It drew the reader in and was creative. Yes, I am proud of this essay. :)
Another essay I recycled was my personal statement. A personal statement may sound daunting and open-ended, but really, the reader just wants to know about you: what drives you, what struggles have you had, what makes you tick. It doesn't have to be (and shouldn't be) and autobiography); for most of these essays, you'll want to write a page or less, so check the word limit. Sometimes it is helpful to start with a quote, personal anecdote, song, famous quote, etc. You want to draw in your reader.
For my personal statement, I again started with a quote (yeah, I like doing that), but this one was different.
"You're useless," said the voice in my head.
A little startling, isn't it? But it was supposed to be. I went on to discuss my struggle with chronic pain and, specifically, when I went on a work crew trip to the Gulf Coast and had to look for things that I could do within my limitations. I then spoke about what I learned and what had happened to me since that time.
This essay wasn't quite so light-hearted; however, it spoke of me. It was who I was and where I had been, and it showed that clearly without being self-pitying or too dark. I used it on several open-ended essay questions, as well as a question about dealing with difficulty. You can be really personal or not so much. It doesn't have to be a big problem, like having cancer or something; you can just talk about something that makes you who you are. It could also be a memory or a story from your life. In short, they just want you!
Be patient with your essay writing. I know it can be frustrating; sometimes you may just have to walk away. You might want to write a few drafts of an essay and merge them together, or scrap something altogether and rewrite it (that's how I ended up with the chicken nuggets essay).
Make sure you have someone proofread for you. Ask that person to be honest and offer suggestions. You could even have several people read it. I'd advise that you don't ask your best friend; chances are that he or she will not give constructive feedback (unless your best friend is a grammar freak like me). Ask an English teacher, counselor, or parent.
Other things to note:
--Stay within the word limit. If they asked for 500 words and you send three pages, your essay may not even be read. You may have to delete some words to stay under the limit, so you need to be choosy. See if you can take out some words that are not needed (or even a sentence or two) or combine some words. Just make sure you keep your main ideas.
--Read all the instructions. Make sure you answer all parts of the question and give all required information.
--Play with your spacing and margins. You don't want to leave a lot of white space if you are asked to write one page, but you don't want size sixteen font, either.
--Even though you have someone else proofreading it, you still need to read over it and make sure you like how everything is written and that it sounds like you. Also, make sure your essay is written to whom you want it to be written. In other words, don't mention how you'd love to go to Harvard or you'd be honored to receive a Kiwanis Club scholarship when it is going to Yale or to the Rotary Club. This may seem obvious, but it really does happen all the time. And really, you can leave stuff like that out unless it is integral to your essay.
One last thought: your college application essay very well could be a scholarship application essay as well. My biggest scholarship came from my college, and I didn't even have to apply for it! They put my application in a pile with the applications of students with similar grades and then chose from there who received the scholarship. My admissions counselor told me that one of the first things they looked for was whether or not I wrote an essay, since essays are optional at this school for your application. The essay may have been the tipping point for me to get the scholarship that enabled me to go there! For this reason, I suggest that you include an essay even if it is optional. It could mean the difference between a scholarship and having to pay the price yourself! Just remember that you want your essay to be you, yet professional and polished.
Ok, this has been a whole lot of information! I hope it has been helpful to you!
Next time: where to find scholarships and basic application help.
