Signatory Applicant Resume Made Easy

Signatory applicant resume

Hi everyone, you're watching the Spivey Consulting Group Law School Admissions YouTube channel, and I'm Danielle Early. I'm from the Spivey Consulting Group, and I am a former admissions officer at Harvard Law School, and I'm here to talk about the biggest mistakes you can make on your law school application resume. So why do schools ask for a resume? Well, they want to understand what you've been doing, what your qualifications are, what your skills are, and what your experiences are. They do ask for similar information on their applications - some schools do, not everybody - but this is your place to put it together in a way that tells your story. Mistake number one is not putting enough time into your resume. Take the time to put everything down on paper and then step away from it. Come back to it, see if you've made any grammatical mistakes, if you forgot to put anything in - you want to make sure that it's as good as it possibly can be when you're submitting it, so don't leave it to the last thing that you're working on. Number two is thinking that the length actually matters. You don't want a resume that's more than two pages, but there is not a hard and fast rule that it must be one page or that a two-page resume is better. It's really about the content. Length frankly never impressed me. You want to think about, what are the things that you need to tell them about? Don't squish it all onto one page just to make it one page, and don't add fluff just to make it look like it's more impressive than it was. The people reading it know the difference. Number three is formatting. There's the ability to obsess over formatting and not pay enough attention to it, so that would all be one mistake. Make sure that your formatting is clean, it's easy to skim for the admissions reader, but don't take so much time where you're thinking that there's going to be a difference in your decision based on the font that you actually use. So another mistake is leaving important information off of the resume. Remember that all the things that you include don't have to be related to law, so if you've had a job that you spent doing while you were in college and you were working full time in college, absolutely you should be including that, no matter what that job was. Remember you're applying to an academic institution where there's a community there. They want to see that you've been involved in a community before, so don't think that you should leave off all of your extracurricular activities from when you were in college. Another mistake is including unnecessary information. So, for example, if your GPA is below the median of the schools that you're applying to, then you're not really benefitting yourself by including it. You can leave that off and save the space for something else. You don't need to include information from when you were in high school. You should probably leave that off of your resume at this point in time. And lastly, don't include unnecessary skills. There's probably nobody graduating from college right now who doesn't know how to use Microsoft Office, so probably not something that you need to include when you're writing the bullets of the different activities and things that you've been involved in. Make sure that you're thoughtful about it - don't use jargon that only people in your own industry know, make sure that it's accessible to whoever is reading it. Don't exaggerate, but definitely make sure that you showcase what you've done and what you've learned. Also make sure that your bullets are focused on you and what you did at that company or in that organization. You don't need to spend the time explaining the company or selling the company to anybody else. Of course you want to make sure that you don't have any simple mistakes on the resume. Make sure that you've proofread it, make sure that you have a consistent formatting and that your grammar is right. Lastly, one size doesn't fit all. So you're going to create a resume that will work for most schools, but before you submit it to every school, make sure that you've gone through and read the instructions on every school's application, because you might find that one school wants to know how many hours per week you spent in the different activities that you've listed on your resume, another school may want them separated out into a different format, jobs that you got paid for versus jobs that were unpaid or internships. You want to make sure that you're showing them that you've actually read their directions and that you're detail-oriented. The last mistake about the resume actually isn't about the resume, it's about your personal statement. Don't treat your personal statement as a prose rendition of your resume - you've already done a great job of telling them the broad information about yourself, now you can go deep into something with your personal statement, so don't feel like it needs to be a copy of what's on your resume. Thanks for watching! If you found this helpful, click the like button below. Also subscribe to our channel. We'll be sending out more information and giving more advice on lots of different topics for law school admissions from former admissions officers from Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Penn and others. If you've got ideas about other things that we could talk about in our videos, put a comment below. If you need more personalized advice, definitely reach out to us, and we offer free consultations. Send us an email at info@spiveyconsulting.com.