By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.
The summer season is a great time to boost your student resume with activities you don’t have time for or that aren’t offered during the school year.
A good student resume should have a balanced combination of activities (sports, clubs, music, etc.), volunteering, and work experience. For many students, the summer months are the one opportunity you’ll get to build out these categories of your student resume.
While you’re in school, you’ll likely be participating in activities like school-run sports and school-based clubs. These are excellent ways to enrich your student resume (and yourself), but they’re not the whole picture.
How to boost your student resume over the summer
The following list contains three ways to boost your student resume over the summer. In many scenarios, more isn’t always better, but when it comes to increasing your skill set, building your capacity for learning, and creating a resume that reflects your awesomeness, I suggest you follow all three tips.
1. Get a job.
This tip might be the most obvious in the whole list, but so many students overthink this one. Having any type of paid work to put on your resume is better than not having any paid work to put on your resume. Even a job scooping ice cream over the summer shows that you have time management skills, responsibility, commitment, and work ethic. Here are my top tips for applying to summer jobs as a student.
Exception: Students who are applying to prestigious institutions and competitive programs should put more thought into what type of jobs they have over the summer. For example, if you want to be a pre-med student in college, you should consider summer jobs that are least tangentially related to the medical field. But for most students, any legitimate paid work counts.
2. Volunteer with consistency.
Volunteering is a critical section of the student resume. If you’re a busy student who doesn’t have time to earn volunteer hours during the school year, get it done over the summer. The key, however, is that your volunteering efforts should show consistency from summer to summer. In other words, avoid taking on random community service projects that don’t “add up” to a larger picture: this can make your volunteering experiences seem scrappy and forced, even if they’re not.
One option is to volunteer with the same institution each summer. Or you could volunteer in the same industry each summer, but through different avenues or businesses. Consistency shows dedication, and that’s a valuable impression to make. Here are some volunteering opportunities specifically for students.
3. Take online courses.
Wait, hear me out. I know summer courses sound dreadful, but they don’t have to be. Adding a summer course to your resume is a brilliant way to demonstrate your commitment to continuous learning, adaptability, and initiative to expand your skill set.
Conveniently, many summer courses are available online and can be taken asynchronously. This means you just get the work done on your own time. It’s a bonus if you get credit for these courses, but credit is not even as important as the fact that you simply took the course. Here are my best tips for taking summer courses without getting overwhelmed.
Choose courses related to your academic interests or future career goals, or a course you’re personally interested in, like coding or graphic design. Find course listings through your school guidance department, local universities, or, if you’re in high school, through any prospective college you’re thinking of applying to.
Finals notes about boosting your student resume over the summer
The summer months should certainly be a time to downshift and recuperate after the vigor of an academic school year. But don’t miss the opportunity to use the few school-summers you have to enrich your student resume, and most importantly yourself. Beach days are great, yes. But you can balance relaxation and beach days with some of the tips in this post. In fact, you should.
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