Last Thursday my friends and I attended a resume building workshop hosted by the South Asian Student Association (SASA). This workshop was comprised of three different stations. The first was meeting with some upperclassmen to discuss the importance of your resume. The second was learning how to make and maintain a LinkedIn profile and the third was a professional headshot station. I had a copy of my resume with me so I was able to share it with a member of the club who is a senior. Lav was able to give me tips on how to make my resume appear better and how to possibly add more content to it. Some of the tips he gave me included: making your name the biggest thing on the page, getting rid of the white space, have consistency with the spacing, use aggressive verbs, and use a higher level of vocabulary. We were even given a statistic which said that the average amount of time that an employer spends looking at your resume is six seconds. The best piece of advice that I received was to make your resume look the best that you can because employers usually judge it with a glance.

The other station which I attended was the LinkedIn profile design. I do not have a profile yet but I know it is very important to have one. The leader of the station told us that LinkedIn is a branding tool that every person who wants to work in Corporate America needs. Also, when employers do a web search on their employees, LinkedIn profiles are often one of the first things that appear on search engines, so it is always beneficial to have all your accomplishments right there in front of your prospective employer. This workshop was very helpful in that I was able to get a lot of my questions about my future career answered. I would recommend everyone to attend some type of workshop like the one I attended just to get another pair of eyes to look over your professional plan.