Handouts about Pre-Professional Writing

Resumes—The goal of a resume is to help you obtain a job interview by showcasing your qualifications to prospective employers. Ideally, you should revise your resume each time you apply for a different job in order to highlight your most relevant skills and abilities. Avoid the temptation to fill in a template—the format and content of a resume is meant to display your unique personality and qualifications, not your data entry skills.

Graduate School Admissions Essays—Most candidates for graduate school have similar test scores, transcripts, and letters of recommendation. The graduate admissions essay is an effective way to set yourself apart from the other candidates, and it could be the decisive factor in your admission. Use it to both demonstrate your knowledge of the program to which you are applying and to share one or two experiences that illustrate your most relevant accomplishments and unique qualifications.

Letter of Application/Follow-up—Letters of application usually accompany resumes. The purpose of these documents is to help you obtain a job interview.

Scannable Resumes—Scannable resumes allow potential employers to scan information into a computer which then identifies the individuals whose resumes include key words and phrases that closely match the job selection criteria. Employers receive so many resumes in a given year that they have adopted this process as a more efficient alternative to visually scanning traditional resumes. This system has motivated many large companies to ask for a scannable, rather than traditional, resume.