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This article is co-authored by Dr. sc. Christopher Taylor. Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 969,740 times.
The interests and hobbies section of your resume or college application provides a good opportunity to show your personality. Done right, it can even make up for a lack of experience or education. Although you may think that all CVs are the same, you should always target your document to the specific audience that will read it, taking into account what they expect of you as a candidate. In this article, we’ll discuss how to write about your hobbies and interests for two resume audiences: the college admissions committee and a potential employer.
Examples of interests of graduates.
Examples of hobbies and interests of graduate students.
Example of a paragraph about hobbies and interests
Example of a paragraph about dancing hobbies
An example of a list of hobbies and interests.
Sample club and association list
Format your application resume by priority. You probably know the basics of a resume: education, work experience, skills, awards, and hobbies. However, listing all these data is not enough. You should think about the order in which this information is presented on the resume.[1]
- College admissions committees are far more interested in your grades, work experience, skills, and awards than they are in your hobbies and interests.
- As such, the hobbies and interests section of your resume should appear at the bottom of your resume. End with it, don’t lead with it.
- Prioritize individual activities as well. You can list his activities chronologically, as you probably did in the “Work Experience” section, or from most impressive to least impressive.
- Always remember that resumes are “top-down” documents, which means you should start with what you most want readers to know about you.[2]
Use the proper terminology. While you may think of tennis or chess as a fun hobby, the language you use on your resume should indicate more seriousness. Instead of heading the “Hobbies and Interests” section as “Hobbies,” name it “Activities” or “Extracurricular Activities.” By using a more formal diction, you subtly give the impression that you have shown commitment and professionalism in practicing these activities, rather than just messing around and having a good time. That’s what universities are looking for.
Choose a formatting style for the numbered sections. All parts of your resume that include itemized lists should be formatted in the same way. The “Activities” section of your resume should have the same format as the “Work Experience” section. There is no single correct method to use, but you need to make sure you leave space to not only list your activities, but to concisely expand on them.[3]
- Don’t just list all your activities with commas. This suggests that you have nothing to say about what you did other than the fact that you did it. Separate each activity into its own point.
- Decide if you want to write complete sentences or short phrases. The CV should not be too long; ideally, it should fit on one page. If you think your resume is too long, use phrases instead of full sentences.
- For example: “Tennis: National Champions, 2013, 2014; varsity co-captain, 2012-14; varsity member, 2010-14.
- If your resume is not long enough and you need to expand it, you can write the same information in complete sentences: “Tennis: As a varsity member from 2010 to 2014, I helped my team win the national championship in 2013 and 2014. As From 2012 to 2014 co-captain, I provided leadership on and off the field, running the team’s offseason practices and holding teammates accountable to each other.”
Show roundness. College admissions officers don’t expect graduates to know exactly what the future holds. While you want to show in your essays that you have a plan for your future and high goals, colleges know that in reality, students’ plans often change as they enter the course and develop their interests in college.[4]
- The activities section of your resume is where you can show that you are not one-sided-minded. You have a variety of interests that you can develop during your four years at the university.
- If possible, present a variety of activities that demonstrate engagement, curiosity: athletics, volunteering, academic teams, interest in the humanities (speech team) and STEM (math) fields, etc.
- The better it looks, the more attractive it will be to the committee trying to assess how it will play out over the next four years.
Stand out from the rest. This may seem counter-intuitive from the previous step, but you don’t want to appear so complete that you can’t stand out from all the other candidates. Consider what activity you have been involved in and what sets you apart most from the rest of the candidate pool.[5]
- Show a high level of interest in at least one of their activities. Whether you were a team captain, an elected official, or a committed member of the group, you should highlight that as much as possible.
- Describe leadership qualities you may have developed through this activity: “As Key Club president, I chaired weekly meetings, delegated club responsibilities to committees, expanded our presence by recruiting colleagues to volunteer, and oversaw member training before to send volunteers to the community.”
- Explain what peripheral qualities you have developed: “During my four years with the Key Club, I developed an ongoing commitment to underserved populations in local communities.”
Choose your language carefully to fine-tune your activities. Most of these tips so far have assumed that you have a wide variety of impressive activities that can easily be included on your resume. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many college applicants. While you should never make up activities for your resume, you can make the few activities you do have more impressive by choosing your language carefully.
Use active voice on every document you submit in the application process.[6]
The passive voice suggests that you passively received skills or qualities from your life experiences, while the active voice shows your commitment: you gained those skills.- Consider the difference between “Being on the soccer team taught me the importance of being a team player” and “I strengthened team determination and success by emphasizing to individual players the importance of group cohesion in achieving our goals.” goals”. Take credit whenever possible, even if you weren’t in a leadership position.
- Even if you think you didn’t get much out of an activity, think about the skills and qualities you might have developed. For example, you may have been a terrible cheerleader, but you can still say, “I committed to training hard every day during the season and developed an effective time management system, balancing schoolwork and cheerleading while committing to complete with both.”
- Even if you won’t make the varsity cheerleading team, you have shown that you can manage your time, something you learned from cheerleading.
Decide if the “Hobbies and Interests” section is appropriate for this job. Depending on the application conventions of the industry you are applying for, it may be inappropriate to list your hobbies on your resume. A potential employer may not care, and you don’t want that sentiment attached to your application.[7]
- Research the corporate culture of the company you are applying to. Some companies encourage employees to bring their interests into the creative workplace, for example, Google specifically encourages an “open culture” workplace where hobbies are welcome. A hobby section would be very suitable for a tech industry application at a company like Google.
- However, if you’re applying for a position with an accounting firm, the corporate culture may not be as welcoming to your hobbies. Leave them on that resume.
Be brief. While a college admissions officer wants to get an idea of how you might develop during your college career, a potential employer wants to know, as briefly as possible, whether or not you’d be a good fit for the position. Stick to 7 words or less for hobby or interest. Don’t think about how you feel in harmony with nature when you’re riding your bike every morning if you’re applying for a job at a consulting firm. Just say that you ride your bike regularly and participate in races.
Choose your interests carefully. Don’t mention interests if you’re not really passionate about it; If you come up in an interview, your lack of passion and knowledge will give you away as a passerby on your resume.[8]
- Choose interests that not only mean a lot to you, but also show what kind of person you are.
- For example, “reading” is a fairly generic activity that doesn’t reveal much about you. However, running a marathon suggests that you possess a high level of commitment and can overcome obstacles.
- “Listening to music” doesn’t tell your employee anything about you, but “I practiced classical piano for 17 years” tells them a lot.
- “Volunteering” tells an employer something about you, but it’s not as detailed as it could be. Instead, say you volunteer weekly at the same soup kitchen for 3 years, or use your experience from a state champion high school soccer team when you volunteer as a coach for a community soccer league. .
- In general, hobbies that demonstrate leadership skills, personal initiative, dedication, or drive are good boosters for your resume.
Connect your interests with work. Whenever possible, demonstrate how the skills and qualities you develop through your hobbies make you a better candidate for the position for which you are applying. For example, a consulting firm may not care how mountain biking brings you closer to nature, but will want to know if you’ve competed in some big races that required commitment and determination in your training, or if you’ve sustained an injury. serious that at one point it threatened to derail your hobby, but that the obstacles did not bother you and that you overcame them.[9]
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Source: HIS Education