Thoughts on Writing a Resume

A resume is what you will be presenting yourself as an index to the application office. The reason I use *index* instead of *summary* is because the officers might want to learn more about you from the bullet points you stated in the resume. Therefore, you should put phrases that will interest the officer, then use other ‘redirect’ methods (e.g. a YouTube link to the video you’ve made, a Social Media link to the photos you’ve to take or community services you’ve attended to, and/or the paper you’ve composed towards your most favorite subject). Those resources will put yourself into a more competitive position; moreover, it allows you to express yourself more creatively instead of staying in the rules of resume - it reduces the creative and unique side of you - which is what the officers are expecting to see.

After the failure of applying Phillips Academy, I then try to rewrite and polish all of my application materials to better describe myself in multi-aspects. Furthermore, I used several different materials to present the intelligence in multi-subjects of me. To polish your resume, you might want to follow some of the guides below:

• Come up with your resume - try not to use any templates on the internet, but grab a pen and a piece of paper, have five minutes brainstorming and then use your favorite tool to create it. It will make not only your resume way more unique, but it also gives you a chance to challenge yourself towards college paper writing.
• Be a professional - I suggest that you start with LaTeX, a document preparation system, which you will use it when you write your paper in college or trying to share a complicated mathematical equation with your teacher. It allows you to have full control with your document, comparing to invisible style marks in Word or box-like layout system in Pages which personally speaks, not suitable for creating such an important document.
• Try to keep everything in one page - people tends to feel tired when they are reading a lot of content, and to try to narrow your contents down to one page means you will pick the unique and top one in all of your activities, giving a higher ‘content value density’ of your resume.
• Describe your advantages using data - the application office will receive tons of applications, and I think that to filter out students the most efficient way, is to use numerical properties of you. In other words, your GPA, your group rankings in a national competition, or even the amount of paintings you’ve painted, and perhaps including the percentage of them got a reward should appear on the most important position on your resume. Those numerical data values will make you stand out from the people who describe their experiences blurry, making it feels untrustworthy.
• Application officers were humans - of course, they are. They were just like you: they feel happy when achieving their dream, and feel sad when they don’t. In this context, they will feel excited too when you come up with a Top 1% in an international competition, and they will feel tired when you try to explain how many hours you spend on your TOEFL exam - they don’t care about them.
• Be accurate and persistent - do NOT use blurry description. A blurry story can make your resume untrustworthy and will give officers an unreliable natural impression. A good example can be: We won the 1st place on Intel International Science & Engineering Fair (International) in 2016 and received a $3,000 monetary prize. A bad one could be: I won the 1st place and have a 3,000 dollars bonus on an International Competition.
• Register a professional email address - don't use the QQ mailbox, 163 mailbox or something similar to an email service provider who uses numerical digits as their username or domain. It looks both not professional and gives an impression to the officers that you are not treating this seriously. Although this might seems ridiculous and unnecessary, it could affect your application. A good email example might be: [email protected] (Gmail with your name is a right path to go) or [email protected] (With your domain might be a plus here)

That being said, to get better with Academical grades, come out from your comfort zone and do critical trial-and-errors shall be, broadly speaking, the right path to go.