By: Jacinda Taggett of Academic Memories
Getting started on scientific résumés is difficult, especially when you don’t have the “relevant” experience. However, there are plenty of ways to showcase the skills and experiences you DO have, regardless if you have formal research experience, to land your first internship. Below we will go through steps to take, before, during, and after curating your first scientific résumé!
Skills to Obtain
In order to get started in research, you might want to develop certain scientific skills in your coursework or extracurriculars to stand out from a typical beginner, this will also provide a good scientific background to your résumé without having formal experience!
Coding
An unspoken part about doing research is that no matter the field, you are likely going to need coding experience. This can be seen with tasks anywhere between simple statistics for testing your hypotheses and coding your own experimental designs to implement.
Common coding languages for beginning research, in my experience, have been Python and R. For beginners in these languages, it is recommended to take an introductory course either through your institution, YouTube tutorials, or corporations like Coursera. Once you have fundamentals of what programming looks like in these languages, begin practicing the steps of research with small scripts and an interactive platform (e.g., Jupyter Notebook for Python, RStudio for R). This would look like taking an exemplar dataset from the internet and practicing basic data cleaning and analysis. Once you have refined these skills, you can put them on the skills section of your résumé!
Statistics or Research Methods
A follow-up to the previous skill is learning basic statistics and/or research methods. Most institutions will offer an elementary course in either of these topics, so having a general understanding of how research is conducted and analyzed will help you stand out as a beginner! List the course(s) in your education section.
Reading and Writing
Once you get into the more advanced parts of research, you will need to have a firm background in scientific reading and writing. Some great experiences to consider is writing for a student-led scientific blog or journal, where you can practice conducting your own literature reviews and provide evidence for your experience.
Lab Techniques
Depending on what type of research you are interested in, you should consider learning laboratory techniques through your institution’s courses. Oftentimes this comes with taking chemistry, biology, or related science courses with mandatory labs. Although the skills you obtain here seem hardly related for some majors, it is still valuable experience to learn for wet lab research positions, which will oftentimes have you do data collection.
Building your Resume
Personal and Contact Information
The top of your résumé should have personal and contact information for yourself. This includes your full name (which should be the largest feasible font on the page… probably font size 14-16 and bolded), email, phone number, and address (city, state, country… NOT THE STREET ADDRESS). Another option is to have a hyperlink to your LinkedIn profile, which should also highlight the same information as your résumé.
Education
The first section below your contact information should be the “Education” section. If you are a beginner researcher, you would need to emphasize this more. Information to include is your institution(s), majors/minors, and GPA (preferably 3.0+ for STEM, 3.5+ for humanities). You can also include a “Relevant Coursework” subsection, which will highlight not only courses related to the potential research you want to do, but also the skills you would need to do research (e.g., statistics, coding, writing, labs, etc.). Lastly, if you have a few honors, one to three, then you can list them in this section. However, if you have more than that, consider having a separate “Honors and Awards” section closer to the bottom of your résumé.
Research Interests
For beginning researchers, it is essential that you include a “Research Interests” section near the Education portion of your résumé. This should highlight three to five overall themes, topics, or techniques you are interested in researching. Make sure that these summarize not only your personal interests, but also the research you are hoping to apply for, such as internship positions.
Work and Volunteer Experience
Since you are a novice researcher, it is good to include any possible work and volunteer experiences you have. These show good teamwork or leadership skills, which are oftentimes needed for working in research settings. Additionally, skills you obtain via these experiences might be useful depending on the research environment you are applying to (e.g., working with computers or having customer service experience).
When explaining your work experiences, make sure to have bullet points that follow an action verb + task + outcome formula. For example, if you were explaining your volunteer experience as a university club officer, this would look like “Promoting workshops on how to get involved with research to undergraduates, with over 50 students attending per session.”
Skills
Your skills section can either go above or below your experiences section(s), depending on how much relevant experience you have to your field. The skills section closer to the top indicates that you want to emphasize your skills, whereas at the bottom you are more emphasizing the experiences.
When listing off skills for your first research résumé, you should consider how these skills relate to your field of interest as well as your goals for pursuing research.
Do you want to do a thesis? Emphasize reading and writing.
Do you want to do a field that requires more “dry lab” experience? Emphasize coding and statistics.
Do you want to do a field that requires more “wet lab” experience? Emphasize the different lab techniques you obtained in your classes.
Professional Summary
Lastly, the professional summary for your résumé highly depends on the amount of space you have on your résumé after including all of the information above. It is usually recommended for beginners to include a professional summary above their experience section, since it gives them a chance to explain their goals and interests without having direct in-field experience. However, do not feel as if you have to take out “irrelevant” experiences to fit a professional summary, as discussed before all experiences can be valuable!
Stylizing your Résumé
Most templates online for résumés are absolutely terrible. They’re filled with color, images, and graphics that are NOT needed. However, as a student entering into applying for internships for the first time, it seems easiest to go with what is already given via Word Document or Google Docs. THIS IS NOT THE CASE!
To effectively style your résumé, try to start with a completely blank page and choose a font to encapsulate your professional image. Common fonts are Times New Roman, EB Garamond, or Georgia for professional resumes, all with 10 - 12 pt size. Type all of your education, experiences, and skills to get a general outline of what you want to emphasize, and try to keep it within one page!
Once you have a general outline, play with formatting. Make use of bolding, italics, underlines, and UPPERCASE to separate different topics or elements. Common practice is to make section headings bolded and underlined. Institutions/companies/organizations and subheadings usually stand out by bolding. Secondary information can be italicized, and the rest can be formatted normally but potentially bullet-pointed to showcase important phrases or skills.
Once all of your information is aligned to the left with formatting to showcase importance, you can also play with margins and indents to give easier readability for your audience. This can be the more time-consuming part of building a résumé, but it is so worth it! You want to keep margins and indents consistent throughout the résumé. For example, section headings (“Education”, “Research Experience”, “Skills”, etc.) should be furthermost left, then all subheadings can be .5 indent to the right from these headings, then the bullet points can be another .5 indent from the subheadings. This is up to your personal preference of course, but also depends on how much information you have to display! If you have lots of information, then smaller indents are needed to fit everything on one page. Additionally, if space is an issue, you can shrink the margins to provide less blank space along the edges of the page.
Final Products
After you have a finalized first draft of your résumé built, make sure to save your résumé in multiple formats. I recommend one editing format (Google Docs, Microsoft Word, etc.) and one distributing format (PDF is best). When naming your document(s), you want to make it as specific to you as possible. Do NOT put a generic title such as “Resume” or “Research Resume”. These titles can make it hard for recruiters or your intended audience to find the file later on. Instead, consider these titles:
“LASTNAME_FIRSTINITIAL_Resume”
“LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_Resume”
“FIRSTINITIAL_LASTNAME_Resume”
Lastly, look into local or remote career centers that can provide free services for editing your résumé. Most colleges and universities with career centers provide this service, so look into resources available locally first! If these are unavailable or not ready in a timely manner, ask a friend or colleague to quickly look it over instead. This peer-review process is the last step, then you can go on to use it for internship applications and cold emails! Good luck with building your first résumé!
*Updated as of October 18, 2024: scientific résumé template for STEM students, created by Jacinda Taggett
Σχόλια