As a humor columnist for my college newspaper, The Capaha Arrow at Southeast Missouri State University, I was long-winded and often wrote longer columns than space would allow my editors to print. Seems I loved the sound of my own voice (and if you’ve gotten this far into this e-book, I doubt you’re surprised). So my adviser gave me an excellent, if politically incorrect, piece of advice: “The ideal length of an article is the ideal length of a woman’s skirt,” he said. “Long enough to cover everything, but short enough to make it interesting.” And the same holds true for resumes.

If there’s one rule that just about everyone has heard about resume writing, it’s that you should keep your resume to one page. But is it true? As usual, the answer is, “it depends.” If you’re a college student – especially an undergraduate student – then 99 percent of the time, the answer is yes, you should keep it to one page. If you’re some kind of wunderkind who was speaking five languages and taking community college classes while your peers were double-dutching and making Pinewood Derby cars, then you may have an argument for a second page. If not, then stick to one page. And I really do mean 99 percent of the time, so this probably means you.

Yes, but: Inevitably, when I talk about the one-page rule, I get at least one or two students who raise their hands and say, “But I’ve accomplished SO much and I’m in SO many activities and have SO many accomplishments, that I just can’t fit all my important information on one page.” My answer? Unlikely. Certainly, some students are so busy achieving that, when it comes time to get it all down on paper, it just won’t fit. But all that tells you is:

a) You need to be more choosy about what you include in your resume. Your future employer can live without knowing some of this stuff.

b) The things you do include, you need to write about more concisely.

c) You need to use the formatting tools in your word-processing software to your advantage.

Again, I don’t say this to discourage you high-achievers out there, or to suggest that you shouldn’t be proud of all your accomplishments. You should. And I know how you feel. I graduated summa cum laude, got a string of writing awards, was in a half-dozen honor societies, etc., so I know what it’s like to feel like a hotshot coming out of school. However, you have to realize that none of the slave-to-the-grind, real-world employers out there – people who don’t know you from Adam – has the time to recognize each accomplishment and be as proud of you as you, your family and friends are. That’s just not on their agenda, and it’s never going to be. What IS on their agenda is to find someone to fill the position in front of them. And you can save them time by fitting all of your relevant information onto one beautiful, concise page. Trust me, it can be done.

Keeping your resume to one page will seem difficult at first, but it’s not that bad once you learn a few tips and tricks. The tips have to do with the content you do and don’t include, and the tricks are in the formatting.

• • Acing midterms and finals is still the number one way to leave college with an excellent GPA. Exams are supposed to cover the most important concepts and skills that a class has to offer and reveal to what degree you’ve mastered all these concepts and skills. So why is it that test scores don’t necessarily give an accurate forecast of how good you’ll be on the job?There are several reasons, actually. There’s an incredible difference in the way “tests” are perceived in college, and in the world outside college. First, let’s get clear on what tests are supposed be: a yardstick to measure how much knowledge you have about some given subject at some given point in time. That’s pretty much it. Note that I didn’t say it was the final day of reckoning at the Crossroads, the day you must match wits with Satan himself about organic chemistry or Constitutional Law for the right to live the rest of your days above ground. It’s just a TEST to see where you are right now. And in the grand scheme of your life and career, “where you are right now” is very near the beginning.But the college system doesn’t treat you that way. It treats you – in every class, at the end of every semester – like you’re at the end of the line. Know everything by now, or else. Or else you’ll get a bad grade. And because of that, students go about their learning process differently. Instead of learning as many concepts and skills as they can for the long-term, they do something different: they start preparing for tests.

    If you’re a college student now or have been a student any time in the last 10 years, you know what I’m talking about. Rarely does a student (and I’m speaking for myself here, too) attempt to read, learn, synthesize and retain all of the material in every course’s syllabus. Believe it or not, that’s what most of our past generations of college students were expected to do – learn everything the teacher covered in a semester, because you never knew what was going to be on the midterms and finals when they rolled around.

    That almost never happens now. Most professors tell you what’s going to be covered on the big tests. Many will even review some questions from the actual test with you. Many will hold big review sessions during regular class hours – the class hours you’re paying them to teach you new stuff, not old stuff. Some will even GIVE YOU THE DAMNED TEST so you can go home and study it. That’s right – they give you a piece of paper with some questions, you go home and find the answers to those questions, you come back the next period and transfer those answers onto the same piece of paper, and voila – you get an “A” on the test.

    Now, many of you are undoubtedly saying, “Yeah….so?” And I probably would’ve said the same thing when I was in college – whatever freed up my time to drink more beer and meet different girls was fine with me. But my point here is different: it’s not to stop partying and start studying all the time – far from it. The point is, if you’re going , you might as well be studying something useful that you’ll remember, rather than 40 questions on a test that you’ll forcefully shove out of your mind once you’ve dropped the answer sheet on your professor’s desk.

    There isn’t too much professors can do about this – it’s simply the way the educational system is set up. The one remedy that’s sometimes available is the ability to take a class on the pass-fail system, rather than for a specific letter grade. I have long been a big proponent of pass-fail classes, and still recommend to any student to take a class pass-fail any time you can. But I’ll talk more about that later.

  • What are the possibilities? You have a low GPA — definitely leave it off. You have an average GPA — why include it? What does it add to your application? It’s strong — ok, but it’s still just GPA, and employers know that the stuff you did to get that GPA are very different from what you’ll do at a job. You don’t go to work from 9-10 and 2-4 on MWF and 12-3 on T and TH. Work is different.Exception — if you have a really, really high GPA, like summa cum laude high or a 4.0, maybe you should include it. There’s still a “wow” factor there, because the likelihood is your boss didn’t graduate with that high of a GPA, and it still impresses some people. That said, remember that most bosses know that your GPA doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a good employee, worker, whatever. Worst, least knowledgeable person I ever had to work with was a 4.0 student, undergrad and grad school.

    Yes, but: Some students and parents (especially parents) think I hold GPA in low regard because I never had a very good one myself, and that I’m simply giving you the “I never had a good GPA, and look at me now!” line. Sorry, wrong answer. I was the salutatorian of my high school class with a 3.96 (we didn’t have those highfalutin’, five-point AP classes in Box Elder, South Dakota, thank you very much), and I got my B.A. in English with a 3.9. Am I bragging? Not at all – just telling you from personal experience that a high GPA means very, very little to anyone outside of your dinner table. In fact, let me punctuate this point with a final anecdote:

    One of the biggest regrets I have about my college education is dropping my French minor. I loved studying foreign languages, and to this day, I still do. But in the middle of my French III semester, I abruptly dropped the class. Why? Because I thought I was going to get a “B” and that would hurt my GPA. Let me be clear here: That decision was asinine beyond words. I cannot describe how stupid it was for me to do that. Never once, in the history of my life, has anyone asked me what grade I received in French III. Ever. But because of that choice, there ended my formal French study. There ended my quest to master that beautiful, romantic tongue – to saunter off to Europe and meander through France, Switzerland, Belgium, wooing lovely francophone girls into jelly with my rugged American exterior yet oh-so-cultured mastery of le francais.

    But thanks to my absolutely silly pursuit of few extra hundredths of a point on my undergraduate GPA, my French stinks. I’ve been to Montreal and Paris and stammered like a fool each time, relying only upon the locals’ goodwill toward English-speakers to get by (lots more of that in Montreal than Paris, by the way). Oh, well. I was in Paris on my honeymoon anyway, so I guess my wife would’ve put a stop to any lovely-French-girl wooing even if I could’ve managed some.

    Don’t be like me. Learn what you want to learn and forget about the GPA. You will never, ever regret it.

• Everything I said about personal interests also goes for social Greek organizations, and also most service fraternities. SomeYes, but: Aren’t fraternities and sororities great for networking after college is over – including job-market networking? Yes, they’re definitely great for networking. And I must confess that I never joined a fraternity, so I don’t have personal knowledge of exactly how far a frat-brother connection will go in the way of landing you a job. My conversations with Greek friends and acquaintances, however, indicate that such a connection is sometimes enough to get your foot in the proverbial door. In light of that, I might make one exception to the above rule: If you’re applying for a job where you know that one of your fraternity/sorority members works and has hiring discretion, then you may want to sneak your affiliation onto your resume. Again, I emphasize this approach only for jobs where one of your Greek brethren has some pull. Otherwise, in a normal job-opening situation where you’re going in cold, fraternity and sorority membership won’t impress the person reading your resume.Yes, but (Part II): “Greeks do lots of charity work, so my association with a fraternity or sorority is relevant for that reason.” It’s true that Greeks do a lot of charity work, but charity work is not the reason for their existence. So you can’t claim a “halo entry” for a fraternity the way you could for, say, working at Habitat for Humanity. Most of your employers have been to college, and whether we were Greek or not, we know that the primary reason a person joins a fraternity or sorority isn’t to do charity work. There’s plenty of charity work out there that doesn’t require pledging, hazing, and dues. And that’s not a knock on Greek life at all – to each his own – but let’s call a spade a spade.

• Almost without exception, you should not put high school achievements on your resume. Unless you cured a disease or saved the world from certain destruction and have the newspaper articles to prove it, leave this stuff out. Why? Because things were different in high school. You were competing against a hodgepodge of 16- and 17-year-olds thrown together by the caprices of geography. Many of those teenagers had no interest whatsoever in competing with you for grades, awards, honors, etc. Some others dropped out altogether to (pick one) join a gang, deliver pizza full time, follow Phish around the country, or smoke cigarettes at the mall.The fact that your accomplishments bested those of your above-mentioned peers five years ago is not impressive to a present-day employer. It’s not that you can’t still feel good about it. Hey, I still treasure my high-school discus medals and that time I took third out of 150 competitors in an English Literature competition. But I don’t put it on my resume, because no one who sees my resume would care.The reason you don’t include that stuff is that you’re into a much higher level of competition now. Everyone you’re competing with wants exactly the same thing you want: the open job. And there aren’t any slouches competing with you anymore – those guys smoking cigarettes at the mall (yes, they’re still there, five years later) are not the ones competing with you now. Everyone you’re up against has a similar background, education and skill set. Because of that, it’s important that you emphasize your recent accomplishments – ones that you’ve carved out for yourself against your current crop of competitors, rather than people from the past who weren’t really breaking their necks to compete with you in the first place.

  Yes, but: “What about major accomplishments, like becoming an Eagle Scout?” There are indeed some accomplishments that mark a person for life, and garner praise for many years – even decades – after they’re earned, even if they’re earned during a person’s high school years. In this case, I’d make an exception to the above rules and include the accomplishment on your resume. For example, there’s no way I’d leave “Eagle Scout” off my resume (especially since I dropped out of Cub Scouts the first time they asked me to tie a knot).

  There may be other awards that carry similar weight, but I’m not aware of them, so your decision whether to include such an award in your resume will be up to you. But before you take the natural step of assuming your award or accomplishment is prestigious enough to include, ask yourself one question: When you tell people who don’t know you about your award, do they have to ask you to explain what that is? Or is it an accomplishment, like Eagle Scout, that everyone instantly recognizes? If it’s the former, then it probably doesn’t belong on your real-world, job-market resume.