Applying to an Ivy League or Ivy-caliber college isn’t an everyday experience. It’s exceptional, and it requires more of you, the applicant, than any other college application. The same can be said for each piece of the application — including the resume. It can’t be the normal, run-of-the-mill resume you used to apply for summer jobs. More is required.
“But what resume?” You ask. “I thought that was optional.”
You were right, but you were also wrong.
The resume is, in most cases, an optional part of the Common App college application. It is not, however, actually optional. When you’re applying to college, you must go the extra mile to stand out, and that’s never been more true than when applying to the Ivy League — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and Columbia — or Ivy League-caliber schools like Stanford and the University of Chicago.
We’ve broken down a standard college application resume elsewhere, and many of the same rules do apply here, but there are a few critical additions and tweaks necessary for an Ivy League-level resume.
First of all, we need you to internalize a few things: everyone who is applying to an Ivy League school is impressive. Everyone has a high GPA and an impressive list of clubs they participate in and a few awards under their belt. In order to get in, you need to be more than impressive. You need to be genuinely interesting.
Statement of Intent
For the vast majority of schools, a Statement of Intent is a genuinely optional aspect of the resume that may or may not be a good fit depending on who you are and where you are applying. For Ivy League schools, including a Statement of Intent at the top of your resume is nearly mandatory.
The Statement of Intent is an opportunity to spotlight your planned trajectory in a concise way. Your resume will ultimately be the one-page (see below) cheat sheet to your application, so think of this as a summary of where you see yourself heading and how you intend on getting there.
Not a Job Application
As you’re writing the Statement of Intent, and the rest of your resume, remember to keep in mind that this isn’t a sterile job application. You must show your personality — as long as it’s kind, thoughtful, and polite. Humor doesn’t hit often enough that we do not recommend using your application as a chance to show you know how to make a joke. So show who you are, but not the you who thinks you should go into stand-up.
Less is More
We often find that students applying to Ivy League colleges have intense anxiety about showing colleges everything about themselves. They want to include every club they’ve been in since 6th grade and every extracurricular activity since elementary school. They’re scared that if they leave something out, that may have been the thing that would have resulted in a yes.
We’re here to tell you that it is much more likely that your resume will be overlooked because you packed too much stuff on without providing context or curation than that including the clown camp you went to in fourth grade would have made the difference.
Instead of cramming every activity under the sun onto your Ivy League resume, adopt a “less is more” approach. Use the resume as an opportunity to expand on what you haven’t had a chance to spotlight or expand upon elsewhere, and to add a little more detail to the most impressive parts of your application. The resume will, at times, have moments of redundancy with your application — that’s why it’s such a useful cheat sheet to who you are — but it also needs to present nuggets of newness about you that make the application reader excited to dig deeper.
The One-Page Rule
There is a lot that needs to fit on your Ivy League application resume, but there’s one rule that can’t be bent to make it all fit: your application must be one page. You cannot make the margins tiny and you cannot make the fonts minuscule to make it all fit. The font must be legible without zooming in, the margins must be reasonable (minimum .5 inches), and it must be one page.
This may seem like an archaic and arbitrary rule, but there are very real pragmatic reasons for keeping a resume to one page, like it being easy to print sans stapler.
There are also editorial reasons to keep a resume to one page. The length limit requires a tight edit, which ensures that you focus on what’s truly the most important. A resume is a distilled picture of who you are. It isn’t meant to be deep or comprehensive, and the one-page limit is an important filter.
As you prepare to apply to an Ivy League school, remember that the resume isn’t optional, it must be one page, it should offer a concentrated version of you, and it should never be boring.
If you’re unsure of how to present yourself on your resume, reach out to us. We help students like you stand out, and get into their dream schools.