During New Student Week 2024, Laura Hartpence, Director of the Career Center, introduced 510 first-year students and new transfer students to career development at Carleton College. Specifically, she gave first-year [at Carleton] students a call-to-action detailing a career development milestone – begin capturing their own emerging story in a first collegiate résumé by the end of the Winter Term 2025.
Here are three ways your first-year student’s résumé is essential in working toward a meaningful career path:
- Evaluate Choice of Activities & Involvement: Writing their résumé early in college allows your student to identify gaps and opportunities to inform decision-making about experiences to pursue. A solution to filling these gaps could be exploring how their interests fit into academics, research, campus activities, community service, campus employment, and more.
- Highlight Transferable Skills: Microstories of accomplishments and problems they’ve solved – great or small – can be used to demonstrate the different skills your student possesses and the ways they’ve applied them, inviting potential recruiters, employers, and other connections to envision the exciting possibilities your student will bring to their team.
- Showcase Interests: Showing the diverse activities they are involved in conveys what drives them, which communicates that your student will be active and engaged. This can invoke a desire in the recruiter/employer to want to meet them and learn more.
To support your first-year student in working towards achieving their first-year milestone – a collegiate résumé – by the end of the winter term, encourage them to attend the Career Center’s Résumé Career Jam for First-Year Students on Friday, February 28 from 12:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m. in the Career Center (Johnson House). Whether your student has a high school résumé and wants assistance with updating it or needs to build their first résumé, you can assure them that the professional career coaches and student career assistants (SCAs) are eager to meet them where they’re at. Your student will receive one-on-one guidance and feedback on how to format, structure, and highlight their experiences and skills into a dynamic narrative that highlights their unique value.