Last semester we had a week-long “Career Immersion” in between Mods 1 and 2. One of the events included a resume workshop with Paul Carozzoni from Career Services who gave some excellent insight on how to craft a resume. He told us very clearly (no confusion when he speaks J) that the most difficult resume to work on is your own. He then picked a resume out of a stack, put it on the screen and began talking to the person about the bullets he had on his resume. I didn’t think there was much that could be done to make the resume better, but Paul showed us how to reword bullets, emphasize key skills, and condense a resume to make it really strong.
Paul asked us to get together with a classmate sometime and do what he had just done – identify areas of improvement on our resumes and make them better. As I was walking back to the parking lot with another classmate, we started thinking out loud about how beneficial it would be to organize a ‘peer workshop’ to review resumes. We wrote up a plan of how this would work, pitched it to 220, and within a week we had a room reserved every other Friday for this purpose.
Several classmates have come to the workshops and the reaction is always the same, “My resume is A LOT better now.” I’ve seen classmates go from not being able to get an interview to getting an interview for nearly every position they apply for. Now that internship recruiting is on the forefront of everybody’s mind, we’ve added another aspect to the workshop, interviewing skills – it has become just as successful as the resume workshops.
The great thing about Smeal is that the students all want each other to succeed. There’s no competition here – just collaboration and support amongst the students to make sure everybody gets the internship they want. These workshops have been a very useful tool to get ready for the whole process and I’ve spoken with the MBAA – the workshops will be here to stay.
MBA Class of 2009
Sammie Markham is a 1st year Supply Chain student in the Smeal MBA Program. He has a background in facilities management and funk music.