The CareerConnect program held a resume workshop, featuring Slate Advisers founder Michelle Vitus, today during long lunch in the Innovation Center.

Drawing from her current experience advising career transitions in Slate Advisers and previous business-related positions, Vitus offered students advice on writing professional resumes. She emphasized the need to include “actions and results” at the heart of the resume, which she summarized with the formula, “Accomplished X, as measured by Y by doing Z.”

“You can say you managed a $25,000 budget, but you can make it even stronger if you say that you managed a $25,000 budget, including three event plannings with student leaders to ensure that one hundred percent were within their allocated budget,” Vitus said.

She expanded on this point by stating that the accomplishments listed in the resume should be specific, with quantifiable measures and details on the means through which the accomplishments were achieved.

“Now we’ve said that you’ve accomplished not only managing this budget, but it was also one hundred percent of the events that you were overseeing that were within their allocated budget,” Vitus said. “And that’s how we’re measuring it — 100 percent of them — and how did you do it? Meeting with student leaders before the event.”

Vitus also noted that there was no one format for a resume. Applicants are free to style their resumes any number of ways, as long as it includes a basic backbone of content and looks professional, neat, and easy to read.

“She talked to us about the structure of the resume, emphasizing that there is no one-size-fit-all approach, but giving a couple best practices to us to be aware of,” Shannon Hong (11) said.

Basics consist of heading, education, and experiences and activities sections. Beyond that, resumes should be tweaked to fit the culture and values of the companies and highlight specific skills.

“I applied to a couple of internships last summer and I needed resumes for a few of them, and I wish I had this resource to brush up my resume instead of just showing it to my parents,” Laya Indukuri (12) said.

Though several students in their junior year, typically a year in which many students apply for their first jobs, attended, a large number of sophomores and freshmen also attended the workshop.

David Wen (9) plans on using these tips for future job resumes. “I felt it would be nice to know about resumes,” Wen said. “[I’ll apply to] probably something in the science field.”

Glass commented that he was not surprised so many freshmen came and that he felt that students who attended would be inspired to create their own resume early on or improve their current resumes.

“It’s important to know people in certain positions and it helps,” Glass said, “but when you’re looking at a competitive environment against your peers, having that nice, polished resume will give you that edge that others won’t, and CareerConnect is really here to help students have that extra edge.”

Students will have the opportunity to have their resumes read by professionals at BEcon on Saturday, Oct. 18.