October 22, 2018

Application Advice Part 3: Resume

Your resume is your best chance to highlight your major academic and professional accomplishments in one place. To help you showcase your strengths, consider these tips on what to include in your resume and how to organize it:

• Your resume should be focused. The admissions committee reviews hundreds of applications each year. The resumes that grab their attention are concise and convey an applicant’s academic and professional history immediately. This means that you should avoid being overly descriptive. Bullet points are more effective than long sentences.
• Follow the one-page rule: Unless you have 10+ years of professional experience, your resume should not be more than one page. Ask yourself: What are the most important things I want the admissions committee to know about me? Put the most important content on one page. Everything else is extraneous. You should choose to include professional experience that is directly related to data science but consider leaving out activities or experiences that are not indicative of your potential to succeed as a data scientist.
• Your resume should be well-organized.Your resume should include clearly defined sections with headings. The most important and relevant sections should be at the top, while the least important should be at the bottom. Some common resume sections include: education, employment, research, publications, extracurriculars, and technical skills. Please note that you do not need to have all these sections in your resume. For example, if you do not have any publications (and most of our applicants do not have publications), you do not need to have a publications section. We recommend arranging the entries in reverse chronological order.
• Your resume should look professional. Use an easily readable font, stick to black and white, and avoid including pictures and images. We recommend submitting a .pdf resume so the format is not altered when we download your application.
• Your resume should be free of errors. Your resume should be free of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Ask faculty, classmates, or colleagues to review your resume.