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As students develop professionally, they maintain a log of their experience and activities to present to potential employers, often in a Word document on their personal computer. This This professional journal allows undergraduates to generate different resumes as needed. If a student is applying to an internship, he often will often develop a resume based on experiences in his this journal, keeping the potential employer in mind when deciding what points to add to the resume. The The resume is often built the night that an application is due, or the day before a career fair. The points are added to the journal , but students who landed job offers tended to add items to their journals as they happen . The student often updates his (e.g. at the end of a summer internship). Some students update their GPA every semester, or right before he makes while others update this when they make a new resume. Often Often the major updates to the journal happen when applying for jobs, fellowships and scholarships. These These activities happen generally twice a year, once in the fall, and once in the spring. People have learned occur once each semester. Students have decided to keep a journal often because a friend, parent, or other mentor has told them to do so, but often this journal tracking starts when the student joins their undergraduate education. Undergraduates have the issue of not wanting to look bad because they do not have a strong resume, which sometimes leads to exaggeration, such as saying that the student is "fluent in Hindi" when he only has a basic understanding of the language.generally after starting college.
2) Students customize a specific version of their resume.
Before a career fair, resume drop, company info session, or interview students need to prepare the latest version of their resume. In order to write this document, they must have a list of their experiences and skills, along with well-written text describing each item. Students then use a word-editing program like Microsoft Word to format some of the text into a one-page resume. One freshman used a Microsoft Word template from an upperclassman in his fraternity; another underclassman duplicated a resume style in a pamphlet provided by the Careers Office; a senior used a LaTeX document that he noted was difficult to change. Many students commented that they rushed this process and hated having to stay up late the night before a career fair to tweak their resume. The MIT students we spoke with seem to typically attend one career fair, four info sessions, and three interviews per semester. They typically update their resume once per semester, but the task becomes increasingly rare in later grades. The most common errors are small typos, formatting inconsistencies, and even occasional mistakes. One student recalls incorrectly listing a summer internship from “June 2008 - August 2009” and another misstated the grade she participated in a club. Some undergraduates have the issue of not wanting to look bad because they do not have a strong resume, which sometimes leads to exaggeration, such as saying that the student is "fluent in Hindi" when he only has a basic understanding of the language.
3) Students maintain different versions of their resume and share them with employers.
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