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Helping Lower Division Engineering Students Develop A Good Resume

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Conference

2007 Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Honolulu, Hawaii

Publication Date

June 24, 2007

Start Date

June 24, 2007

End Date

June 27, 2007

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Recruitment and Retention

Tagged Division

Minorities in Engineering

Page Count

10

Page Numbers

12.801.1 - 12.801.10

DOI

10.18260/1-2--1976

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/1976

Download Count

538

Paper Authors

biography

Mary Anderson-Rowland Arizona State University

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MARY R. ANDERSON-ROWLAND,PhD, is the PI of three academic scholarship programs and a fourth program for transfer students. An Associate Professor in Industrial Engineering at Arizona State University, she was the Associate Dean of Student Affairs in the Fulton School of Engineering at ASU from 1993-2004. She received the ASEE Minoritites in Engineering award 2006, the SHPE Educator of the Year 2005 and was given the National Engineering Award in 2003, the highest honor given by the AAAES. In 2002 she was named the Distinguished Engineering Educator by the Society of Women Engineers. A SWE and ASEE Fellow, she is the Chair of PIC IV and a frequent speaker on career opportunities in engineering, especially for women and minority students.

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biography

Patti Culley Arizona State University

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PATTI L. CULLEY holds a Master of Science in Bioengineering and a Master of Counseling. She worked 6 years as a Research Engineer in the medical device industry, and 5 years as a university career counselor and internship coordinator. She developed the career decision-making model used in the ASU Career Services Career Guide and currently works extensively with engineers, freshman through Ph.D, teaching career management and coordinating the university internship program at ASU. She also consults regularly with industry partners to develop internship opportunities across the university. She is a member of NCDA (National Career Development Association), NSEE (National Society for Experiential Education), and MPACE (Mountain-Pacific Association of Colleges and Employers).

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Abstract
NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

HELPING LOWER DIVISION ENGINEERING STUDENTS DEVELOP A GOOD RESUME

Mary R. Anderson-Rowland and Patti L. Culley Arizona State University

Abstract

Many students need a good resume in their first year of engineering. Most students have a high school resume complete with all of their awards, music and athletic accomplishments, but now they need an “engineering” resume for an internship, a scholarship, or a research position in engineering. The resume can also serve as an excellent career-planning tool, establishing a framework on which to build and a guideline for gap analysis. Creating this new resume is difficult for most students. They need help translating and prioritizing their previous experiences into “skills” that are useful in engineering. With the help of a Career Services representative, who is in close contact with what industry wants on a resume, and the director/mentor of academic scholarship programs, who follows through to make sure that the students write good resumes, lower division students are able to develop excellent resumes. Since checking resumes can be a tedious task, a Resume Checklist was created to empower the students to develop their own good resumes and to show them when revision was needed. This paper will include the main suggestions for a resume given by a Career Services representative, the Checklist, and an evaluation of this Checklist activity. The paper will also include an explanation of how a good resume can serve as a career-planning tool.

I. Introduction

In the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, over 100 students are in three academic scholarship programs that target women and underrepresented minority students, sponsored by NACME (National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering) and the National Science Foundation CSEMS and S-STEM program. In addition to the scholarships, academic workshops help the students with time management, academics (how to learn), resources, and other challenges; especially those faced by lower division students and transfer students. The students in each of these programs meet at least six times per semester. The students are encouraged, beginning in their freshman year, to go to career fairs, to consider internships, and to consider writing a proposal for a research award. For these activities, the students need a good resume.1, 2, 3 The resume needed for an internship or research position is more demanding than the resume used in high school to apply for scholarships. The high school resume is often two pages and predominately a list of activities in which the student participated and honors that the student has received in high school. Now the resume must reflect the skills and knowledge of a promising engineer. Since the lower division students do not have many college-level activities, honors or technical experience, they are often at a loss on how to translate what they do have into a competitive college-level, pre-professional resume.

Anderson-Rowland, M., & Culley, P. (2007, June), Helping Lower Division Engineering Students Develop A Good Resume Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--1976

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2007 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015