Resume Game: LIT

June 10, 2016June 11, 2016Leave a comment

By previous contributor Minnie

If you’re interested in obtaining a summer job, internship, etc., you should know that many companies search for their summer student hires between January to February. If you’re interested in spending your summer getting some much-needed work experience, you may want to revisit you resume and update it for your job search. If you do require professional help with things like career planning and resume writing, don’t be afraid to schedule an appointment with the University of Toronto’s Career Centre.

Here are some tips to having the perfect resume that will help get you hired:

First read and try to understand the job you’re applying for.

Sit down with a highlighter and really read the job description. Go through and highlight the points that seem important (things that are mentioned repeatedly or anything that’s slightly out of the ordinary) and the points that you could speak to with your experience and skills.

This is always step one—after all, you can’t tailor your resume for a position if you don’t really know what the gig entails.

Tell a story. You don’t need to put everything on there.

Your resume should not have every work experience you’ve ever had listed on it. Think of your resume not as a comprehensive list of your career history, but as a marketing document selling you as the perfect person for the job. For each resume you send out, you’ll want to highlight only the accomplishments and skills that are most relevant to the job at hand (even if that means you don’t include all of your experience).

Make your first point immediately relevant.

Job search expert Lily Zhang says it best: “Take your resume, find the experience that would make [your hiring manager] most excited about your application, and rework the document so that’s what’s at the top. Maybe it’s your current position, or maybe it’s some specialized certifications or the freelance work you do on the side. Whatever it is, make it the first section of your resume. And yes, even if it’s not the most recent. There’s no rule that says your first section must be “Work Experience.” Tailoring your resume means finding what is most relevant, creating a section for it, and filling it up with experience or qualifications that will catch a hiring manager’s eye. If that means nixing “Work Experience,” creating a “Marketing and Social Media Experience” section, then throwing everything else in an “Additional Experience” section, then so be it.”

Consider an online supplement.

Can’t figure out how to tell your whole story on one page, or want to be able to include some visual examples of your work? Instead of trying to have your resume cover everything, cover the most important details on that document, and then include a link to your personal website, where you can dive more into what makes you the ideal candidate.

Be concise, but give them numbers.

You’ve heard you should keep your resume to a page. Whether or not this is absolutely necessary is highly debated, and so it depends on your hiring manager. What is absolutely essential is that you keep your resume as concise as possible: imagine reading through hundreds of resumes in a couple of hours. You wouldn’t want to encounter verbosity, or worse, irrelevant experiences from when the applicant was in elementary school. Try, instead, to use as many facts, figures, and numbers as you can in your bullet points. How many people were impacted by your work? By what percentage did you exceed your goals? By quantifying your accomplishments, you really allow the hiring manager to picture the level of work or responsibility you needed to achieve them.

Proofread, proofread, proofread!

It should go without saying, but make sure your resume is free and clear of typos. And don’t rely on spell check and grammar check alone—ask family or friends to take a look at it for you.

Save it as a PDF and name your file smartly.

If emailing your resume, make sure to always send a PDF rather than a .doc. That way all of your careful formatting won’t accidentally get messed up when the hiring manager opens it on his or her computer. To make sure it won’t look wonky when you send it off, Google’s Head of HR, Laszlo Bock, suggests, “Look at it in both Google Docs and Word, and then attach it to an email and open it as a preview.” Ready to save your resume and send it off? Save it as “Your Name Resume” instead of “Resume”. Make the hiring manager’s life as easy as possible.

Now go dust off your resume and go apply to your dream jobs! Dream big and work hard!

Works Cited
“43 Resume Tips That Will Help You Get Hired.” The Muse. Web.<https://www.themuse.com/advice/43-resume-tips-that-will-help-you-get-hired>.

Study Smart, Not Hard

June 10, 2016June 11, 2016Leave a comment

By previous contributor Nicole
Updated June 10, 2016 by Annie

This textbook is literally bigger than my head.

In first year, I met up with a learning strategist at the Academic Success Centre who told me that in an ideal situation, a student would spend 2-3 hours of time outside of class to review 1 hour of content covered inside class. Now, when I first heard this, I thought this was ridiculous.

In university, your time is precious. There are only 168 hours in a week, and if you’re already spending 15 – 30 hours in class (for lectures, tutorials, seminars and practicals combined), being told to spend even more time outside of class seems kind of absurd. For many first years, that would be equal to 45 – 90 more hours, and you would effectively have no time for anything else.

But this was the point. You won’t have time to do everything you’ll get to do; you have to decide which things are most important to you and what would be the most efficient use of your time.

University is comprised of more than just the learning that takes place within the classroom, and it’s highly encouraged that everyone takes time to explore different avenues, take risks and stay open to new things. But if you’re constantly worried about trying to catch up on every single reading or trying to do every single thing your prof recommends, then you may feel like you won’t be able to do that.

So here are a few strategies that have worked for me when it comes to maximizing information retention from lecture and staying as efficient as possible:

Before Class:

If you have time, do the assigned reading; otherwise, skim over it. If you know your prof uses a Socratic method of teaching and requires you to participate, choose at least one key idea from the reading and jot down a few points from it, or a few arguments to back it up. That way, while you may not know everything about the reading, you’ll have a really strong foundation on that one point and you’ll still get the participation marks you need. If your class is more memorization heavy, look over your lecture slides and match up the figures on the slides with the figures in the textbook. Usually, the textbook should have a caption that explains whatever process is being illustrated by the figure, and it’ll do so succinctly.

The time you use to prep for class should only take ten minutes, but it’s important that you do take at least a little bit of time so that you won’t go into class entirely confused.

Case in point?

During Class:

Use the original powerpoint slides provided by your professor. There was a study comparing groups of students who used their professor’s original lecture slides vs. typed out their own notes in a word document. The results showed that those who used the original lecture slides provided and just annotated them during lecture were able to retain more information in tests vs. those students who didn’t.

A lot of this boils down to the fact that powerpoint slides (if well made) spatially separate content, as opposed to word documents, which are just long lines of text. This spatial separation is key because humans are said to have good spatial memory, so anchoring concepts to a specific place will help you remember the concept better in the future.

During class, I take lots of notes on my slides, but my professors speak fast and could probably release a mixtape that rival any and all rappers in the game, so (with my prof’s permission), I record the lectures. Something that I do differently though is that when I come across a particular concept I don’t understand in class, I write down the time that corresponds with my recorder and put a question mark beside the slide, so I can minimize how much flipping back I have to do when I go back and revise later on.

By the end of lecture, the majority of my notes look something like this:

This is an actual page from my OneNote notebook and even as I’m typing this, I still have no idea what’s going on for this slide. Something about running gels? I don’t even know.

As you can see, they’re not prettiest, but I don’t take notes for aesthetics because the textbook already does this for me. My main focus for taking notes is to consolidate the knowledge that I gain in class and make connections, so I can learn the material.

After Class

I go back and relisten to the recordings, usually at 1.5x the speed, and then I fill in points that I don’t understand or may have missed during lecture. If I don’t understand a concept, I’ll go to the textbook and read up more on it, try and read a few abstracts on the material, post on the discussion board or email my prof for clarification. Once I get clarification, I add this to my notes, and then I use different strategies to try and understand the information.

Afterwards, my notes usually look like this:

Hooray for having a complete set of notes!

For revision, I mainly use the Feynmann technique, which is to pretend that you’re explaining the content to someone else but using layman terms, and flashcards, which are great for memorizing little facts on the go, like when you’re waiting in line for a cup of coffee or are commuting to school. Finally, I schedule weekly review sessions to look over content so that by the time the midterm comes around, I’m not frantically trying to cram in half a semester’s worth of information in a single night.

This is the routine that has helped me a lot, but I definitely didn’t come into university with this system perfected; it took a lot of experimentation, a few bad midterms and a lot of reflection to end up with this routine. So tell me, what are some study strategies that have worked for you?

This blogger likes disguising her laziness as efficiency and is enjoying looking at nucleotide structures more than the average person.

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