What, Like It’s Hard? | How to make your resume cooler than you feel

I will never forget when I was 15 years old and my mom sat down with me to make my first resume. The only experience I had on it was a few years of babysitting and the fact that I could play a couple of instruments — real valuable stuff at the time. Then, she drove me over to the next neighborhood’s rec center for their teen job fair. I was nervous and way too overdressed given the kinds of jobs they were offering in the small gymnasium.

I sat down with a recruiter to be a summer camp counselor. She took one look at my resume and added it to the growing stack full of other hopeful teenagers’ dreams. I proceeded to tell her that although I didn’t really like most children, I would still be a great camp counselor. 

Obviously, I didn’t get the job. Complete and total failure on my part. I’ll own it.

Fortunately, today’s blog post isn’t about my super, spectacular, never-fail interviewing skills — more on that at a future time — but rather about the resume itself, the stuff you have to do to fill it up and how you can spin your experience into law school gold.

The really cool thing about law school, unlike other professional institutions, is that there is no one right way to get into it. Sure, legal courses can help prepare you and an outstanding LSAT score can indicate classroom success, but at the end of the day, every applicant is going to be different from each other. There is not one single recipe for success, and with that, there is not one ideal law school candidate. You can have any major, take any classes and work any internships or jobs and still prove to adcomm that you will be a successful law student and future lawyer. From what I know, adcomm really just wants to see that you are/were a good student and that you have the experience necessary to prove you are ready to be a law student.

If you look online, a lot of advice will point you towards political internships, nonprofit work or, if you can find one, a legal internship. These are all great options, especially because finding real legal internships as an undergraduate student is often exceptionally difficult and hard to come by. If you’re lucky enough to find one, you might be shadowing lawyers and helping them prepare for trials, or you might be sitting on the floor going through hundreds of papers and manilla folders. Usually, it is a solid mix of both! But for many people, working low-paying or unpaid internships that might stand out to adcomm in exchange for a few bullets on a resume isn’t a feasible reality, with the cost of living skyrocketing and tuition getting more and more expensive.

If you struggled to get internships or a job, or perhaps are only able to work in customer service to pay the bills, just know that all experience is good experience. On your resume, play up what experience you do have and frame it so that it looks professional and like it would be helpful in the law school environment. If you worked morning shifts at a busy coffee shop, you can demonstrate that you are good under pressure and work well in a fast paced environment. If you sell cars on the weekends, you have excellent people skills and understand the basics of business interactions. At Pitt, if all you had time to do was be a Pathfinder, then you can retain a lot of information and have excellent public speaking skills. 

Even STEM opportunities can highlight valuable transferable skills such as technical writing, collaboration and research. Not every bullet point on your resume has to perfectly translate into a skill you might demonstrate as a legal professional, but you certainly shouldn’t sell yourself short if you feel like you don’t have the perfect amount or kind of experience to highlight when it is time to send those applications in.

And the really good thing about being a college student is that there are a ton of clubs and outside the classroom extracurriculars that are easy to get involved in and don’t require a ton of time on your end. If you are interested in law, Pitt has multiple clubs geared just towards that. But even time spent in random clubs that have nothing to do with the legal field can help cultivate more transferable skills and make you stand out as a candidate. 

My biggest regret as a student is that I wish I would have done a silly club that was purely for enjoyment. While I love all the clubs I am part of and have a lot of fun with them, it would have been a good stress reliever to join a soccer club or a knitting club or something like that. Extracurriculars are a really good way to fill up your resume and highlight your interests while still boasting that you have translatable skills that will help you in the law school environment.

One other excellent way to fill up said resume is to highlight any volunteer work you may have. I have visited eight law schools, and every single admissions counselor, when I asked what kind of things they wanted to see on my resume, told me to highlight all the volunteer engagement that I had. So now I am telling you to do the same! 

Very similar to other work and extracurricular experience, service is an easy way to demonstrate skill sets that will impress adcomm, and it also shows community involvement and a dedication to service activities. Most law schools and state bars, I have found, have some sort of pro-bono requirement. This typically requires students to volunteer around 50 hours of their time during law school to do pro-bono legal work, but most informational meetings I have been to boasted that most of their students complete hundreds of pro-bono hours. This is an attribute that is highly valued by many law schools and is really important to play up on a resume, not only to fill up space but to demonstrate a commitment to the greater good and to community work.

My resume makes me look a lot cooler and a lot more accomplished than I feel most of the time. That insecurity is normal, especially given the competitive nature of law school applications and the pre-law environment both on campus and online. I am just here to remind you, and myself, that there is no such thing as a perfect law school applicant and that nobody’s resume is perfect. I highly doubt perfect resumes even exist.