Don’t be overwhelmed by the process of putting together a resume after you’ve graduated.  Your college resume format is a great foundation for getting internships and jobs, but if you want a more sophisticated post college resume format, just avoid some of the most common pitfalls that recent grads make so your resume stands out from the pack!

The average job posting gets about 300 applications within 30 minutes of going online.  Your resume is vital to getting noticed in an overcrowded applicant pool and should be ready and waiting to email after important networking events.

1. When In Doubt, Hire A Professional

First things first- if you hate the idea of putting together a resume or you’re simply overwhelmed by finding the right adjectives to describe how awesome you are, don’t hesitate to spend money on getting the right resume.  Think of it this way- your resume is the first, and sometimes only communication that potential employers will have with you.  When I graduated with my M.A., I hired the fabulous Melissa Anzman, a HR savvy consultant & career blogger who reworked my resume far beyond what was possible in my previous attempts to update my college resume format.

On a frugality blog, I typically take the stance of “DIY” but delegating this important document was well worth the money and has been a powerful tool to get callbacks and interviews in application pools of 500 people.

2. Your Email & Phone Numbers Should Be As Professional As You Are

I recently had a chat with a few recruiter friends who had to vent about the sheer number of people who use their home line for their resume.  There is no shame in living at home, but there should be a sense of embarrassment if your mommy or daddy answers the phone when a recruiter calls, only to yell out “TINA!!!! SOMEONE’S ON THE PHONE FOR YOU!!”  Likewise, your voicemail message should be professional, state your first and last name and not include anything beyond that, not even playful snark.

Finally, if you have an email address that was created in high school or conveys anything even remotely unprofessional like “CutiePie5269@hotmail” you need to update it.  Also, if you’ve been out of college for more than six months, nothing screams “not ready to grow up” by using your college email address ending in .edu …update it!  You can have all old email accounts funnel into a new one, but only put your best one on a resume.

3.  Do Not Rely On Your Campus Career Center To Be Your Only Proofreader

God bless my university’s career center- they really tried to help me produce a decent resume, but that’s all it was- decent.  While many of their edits were good, they caught some grammatical errors and formatting issues, they had no idea how to tailor my resume for my dream job and an industry that is extremely tech savvy and heavy in marketing jargon. Additionally, you want your resume to stand out, your campus career center might be able to format a resume, but anticipate it will be so average looking you won’t accomplish your main objective- to get notice.  You want your resume to hit all the main points of professionalism, but you also want to get noticed in a sea of hundreds of other resumes.

I highly recommend you network with other people in your industry whether you network with them online or offline, it’s key to have industry savvy people looking at your resume who understand the job you want to apply for.  Without the eyes of an insider, you may be missing out on key points, phrases and connections that could get you noticed.  Don’t assume that the people you have proofreading can spot key points unless they work in your desired industry

4.  Be Careful How You Brag

Perceptions are everything and often, on a piece of paper or PDF file, it’s difficult to manage those perceptions on an 8.5×11″ piece of paper.  Go through your resume and make sure that your talking points aren’t making you look petty or novice.  While it might have been useful to brag about being the social coordinator for the Anime Fan Club to make conversation, if it’s your only talking point you may be perceived as the epitome of a “recent grad.”  Beef up your resume with career relevant conferences, internships or starting a blog relevant to your industry to serve as more recent experience.

Conversely, don’t overbrag.  This is where consulting with an outsider to your social circle who is also an insider to your desired industry is key. Rambling on and on about points that have nothing to do with your desired dream job will take up space and turn off employers.  This is where balance is key- if you were the treasurer of a campus club, or the philanthropy chair of your sorority you should include that on your resume, but be aware on how much space it takes up. Demonstrate you’re a complex individual with a variety of strengths without coming across as desperate to make that obvious!

What pointers do you have to share with job seekers?

Any words of wisdom?

If you’re a college student there are tons of great discounts out there and ways to save money.  I have been able to save $700+ EACH semester using these hacks by living frugally as a student. Enjoy!

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We all value education, don’t we? But as a current graduate student, I’m alarmed by the amount of debt my friends and peers are taking on… $20k, $50k, $100k, $120k. What will happen when our generation wants to buy a home, have a child or put money towards our retirement but we’re still paying off our debts acquired to get a good job in the first place?

I’m not one for conspiracy theories. I HATE generalizations, scare tactics or dramatic claims, but this document makes some thought provoking points about the growing debt of our country, of our college attendees and the economy.  I hate sounding the alarms, but this exact question has been  on my heart and mind for over a year- how will today’s college grads handle their debt, or will the bubble burst?

I personally am concerned that if we had an economic crash in 2008 over the housing market, but many college grads have more debt at age 24 than 44 years old have on their mortgage.

Thoughts?  Do you think the debt is worth it?  Is the answer to the devaluation of the bachelor’s degree simply getting more education (thus more debt)?   Do you know anyone that is in a huge amount of student loan debt? How are they handling their debt?

 I really want to talk about this and would appreciate your thoughts and experiences.

Jenny Blake is one-heckofa-blogger and now a pretty snazzy book author, as she recently released Life After College: the Complete Guide to Getting What You Want.

I just discovered a great resource through igrad.com which is choc-full of wonderful videos, and posts that will help you navigate your financial life.

Jenny just teamed up with igrad.com to release a very informative webinar which will surely shed some light on the climate of student debt, but also with some great tips to getting a grasp on managing your debt, finances and concocting a strategy that makes responsibility less scary!

Click here to listen to Jenny Blake’s iGrad Webinar on

“How to Rock Your Personal Finances”

There are plenty of people in my “real life,” that don’t get why I blog.  I’m a graduate student in a decent school and blogging has a (sometimes deservedly) bad wrap as being small league, unacademic and homespun.  The more I blog, the more I find that just because you use the internet doesn’t mean you get it.  I blog because it allows me to be in touch with an emerging market of internet business that is revolutionizing the way we sell, buy and make money, yet many academics, especially the younguns who use these technologies but rely on their “education” to build a career, simply don’t see it.

I originally decided to go to grad school because I loved sociology and the potential it held for understanding social problems, applying a personal and scientific methodology and interacting with those being studied to solve social problems.  That, my friends, was my nieve little dream- and it didn’t come true.  After about 4 weeks in the graduate program, after hearing cyncial professors joke about how we’d graduate to no jobs, loads of debt and disturbingly low prospects on ever landing the very tenure track positions they were using to tell us such things, (but hey, would still take my money) I was shocked and deflated.

I had busted my butt, spent hundreds of dollars, applied to 13 schools and took the worst standardized test ever created, and I sat in a bar with a friend in downtown Chicago and literally cried in my beer.  I had made an epic mistake, and it was costing me a lot of money to do so.

In fact, that epic mistake costs me about $8k a semester.  I write papers that nobody reads, about social issues that the country is divided over, and hand them in (poorly edited) to professors who have openly admitted to me that they don’t get to read it throughly  (and my good grades reflect this).

That chilly November evening was the start of a new thought process for me.   As I played with my coaster and chewed my bottom lip, my friend took pity on me (you know, after having a good laugh at my naivety) and we began to talk.  He was working for an online company at the time- and that kind of thing fascinated me, something he had to point out since I obviously didn’t want to admit his job was more exciting than my future career.

At the time, I had read blogs- I loved blogs, I had bookmarked them, shared them on Facebook, and made a few friends online, but I had no idea how it worked.  I also had no idea that entire careers were made around blogging, long established old-timey companies were now engaging in it, and indeed, there was something to be gained from becoming a blogger.

At the time, I like most people, knew that blogs were around but had no idea how they operated, how profitable they were, and I undoubtedly underestimated their power.  I didn’t understand that people were making money from home either writing, manufacturing or tinkering with blogs.  I had no idea that the internet was revolutionizing the way we do business and entrepreneurs make money- I knew it was happening, but I was ignorant to its magnitude and scope.

I was terrified but excited. The internet was changing the game, and reclaiming hope for the academically disenfranchized like myself.  I would remain in grad school, but the rules had been changed- the frame had been broken.  I didn’t have to wait around and play the game like other grad students did in order to be allowed to teach.  I didn’t have to pour hours into my writing only to have it languish in obscurity.  If I wanted to publish, I didn’t have to wait around or play into stupid academic politics to get published in a journal, all I had to do was hit publish. The power to tell me if my writing was good, or it sucked, or it needed work, or it meant something was no longer in the hands of few- but it was put out there for potentially, millions of people so different from myself.   My anger was turned into power, my frustration into movement.

Some days, I still grapple with my decision to stay in the program and finish my last semester or two.  The cost is high, the time is that I will never get back and sometimes the classroom is the loneliest place in the world for me since I lack the passion for program that so many of my esteemed peers have found.  I still love sociology, it has taught me about a myriad of social problems, but perhaps I have learned more about social problems by being in the program and seeing how the academic world isn’t functioning to actively solve them- and sadly, I think schooling is now creating some problems.

Sociology taught me about social problems.  Graduate school caused me to live social problems -especially those associated with our generation.  Suddenly, I was meeting students with 20-100k in student loan debt, living on food stamps and anxiously hoping someone would give them a break. It made it abundantly clear that our generation is going to graduate to epidemic debt, and has done little to prepare alumni to tackle the cost of their careers.  It has also taught me that education is based on an outdated framework.  In my few short months of blogging, I am seeing how the world is changing because I am no longer simply a consumer of these changes, I’m watching them happen and as a sociologist in practice, I am predicting how these social changes are going to completely change each aspect of our personal and professional lives.

Sadly, I see so many students applying emerging technologies to make their academic work simpler and easier, but fail to realize that these technologies are making the work easier, but it will not make the outdated pedagogies of the university system relevant.

Students use Skype for study groups, sidestep the over priced campus bookstore through Amazon,  give brutally honest reviews on RateMyProfessor.com, and learn languages via podcast.  While these technologies are making college better, they are also wiping out the very careers and employment mindsets of the previous generation- yet we, as a group, seem to be oblivious to these changes and cling on to the hope that our piece of paper we sacrificed so much for will be enough to save us in the digital age.

So, this is why I blog.   I love to learn, I love to engage, I love to do so for free and even make money as I learn.  Waiting for a teacher to package learning for me, and even paying to do so isn’t sustainable or even attractive anymore.  The jobs in academics are evaporating as we speak, so let’s get engaged.   As a generation, we are witnessing the changes taking place, the markets are shifting and it’s nothing to be scared about  - turn on your technology, turn on your mind and thrive in the rising tide of the digital wave.