Spice Up Your Resume

Summer on the beach, tour a national park, hang out with your friends?

No, not for you. First, you have resume-building to do. Here’s five suggestions to make that high school resume pop in the eyes of any college:

  1.    Pre-college summer curricula are much more fun and rewarding than an hourlong campus tour. These well-developed programs give students the opportunity to meet instructors, take courses, and get a sense of college life. The number of possibilities is immense. For example, Midwest students might explore close to home with such offerings as:

Northwestern University has a five-week program guaranteed to improve writing skills for print, online and other media at the Medill-Northwestern Journalism Institute. And, no doubt, better writers are more efficient and precise for every college paper assigned in the next four years.

Or

iLED is a two-week international leadership curriculum taught by Notre Dame faculty in such areas as architecture, business, engineering and global affairs. It includes hands-on learning, collaborative projects, and business and community engagement. 

2.    Make summer a “working” vacation. No matter where the family goes for summer in the U.S., research potential colleges and visit campuses to get a flavor for how you might fit in. Always remember frequent contacts, college fairs and tours show “demonstrated interest,” crucial to most college admission decisions.

3.    Bolster your LinkedIn profile. Connect with executives in chosen disciplines and join LinkedIn Groups of interest. Post questions and answers to others’ Qs. LinkedIn’s value is its networking capability. Connect with like-minded participants.

4.    Internships in a chosen category are often hard to crack for high school students but aim high. There is a wide selection of jobs out there that fit your personality and work interests. One recent Valle Consulting client was a caddy at a local golf club. But beyond learning how to read a green, this teen talked to the executives in his foursomes about their jobs and used research and tips to develop a stock portfolio for a lifelong understanding of how to do well in the stock market.  And don’t forget those Rotary or Elks Club contacts you connected with on LinkedIn. They might be in a field you are considering and will often give an interested teen a “shadow” someone in your chosen profession. A week or a month “shadowing” an executive in that area will give powerful insights into what the job is like on a day-to-day basis, again picking up networking contacts.

5.    Apple CEO Tim Cook said the most important skill for every student to learn is how to code. Even if you are a social studies whiz with little interest in algorithms, coding is going to touch every future career. Get a head start on the nuts and bolts of apps and other tech underlayment and learn Python, Hadoop, Javascript or a host of other possibilities. Check out the coding waters and dip into Codeacademy, edX, Coursera, Khan Academy or MIT openCourseware. Don’t be shy; the water’s fine and you will get the hang of coding quicker than you think.

--Mike Ryan