Getting Workplace Ready

USM’s resumé writing and job interview workshop provides students with valuable career readiness training they can use immediately.

It’s hard for a teenager to wake up early on a Saturday morning—even harder when they’re doing it to attend a resumé writing and job interview workshop at school. But while they might start the day feeling tired and a little apprehensive, after a few hours, they leave with newfound confidence and a solid resumé.

The annual workshop is open to USM students in grades 10, 11, and 12, and includes resumé writing seminars and mock interviews with parent volunteers. Attendees also heard a presentation on workplace etiquette and expectations from USM trustee and parent Julie Gilpin, who has a 20-plus year career in human resources and recruiting, and who leads 
the workshop. 

“A lot of times students walk into the room thinking they don’t have anything to write on a resumé,” said Gilpin. “But even if they don’t have formal job experience, almost all can speak to working on a team, handling conflict, persevering through adversity, and communicating well. Sometimes they just need help knowing how to articulate those things on a resumé or verbally in an interview.” 

Parent volunteers, who bring a wide range of educational and professional expertise, meet individually with students to review their resumés and offer advice, and then to conduct mock interviews. Students practice verbally summarizing their skills and abilities, as well as using appropriate eye contact, body language, and firm handshakes. 

“I’ve never been in an interview before, so it was really helpful to get feedback from the different volunteers on what I was doing correctly and incorrectly,” said Calder Ely ’27. “And the resumé writing was really helpful, too. I think my draft resumé was probably a paragraph when I walked in, but by the end I had like a page and a half.”

The workshop is required for participation in the school’s Internship and Shadowing program, which launched in 2009 and differentiates USM’s Upper School from area high schools. It provides sophomores, juniors, and graduating seniors with summer internships and job shadowing (both medical and non-medical) opportunities created by school parent-affiliated companies and other organizations. Previous internship and job shadowing experiences have occurred in engineering, finance, journalism, computer science, entrepreneurship, environmental fields, product development, sports management, graphic design, social media, robotics, software development, and many more medical and non-medical fields. 

In addition, the Internship and Shadowing program also hosts Lunch and Learn events throughout the school year, in which students are invited to eat their lunch with leaders and industry experts to learn more about specific fields  of employment. Recent lunch and learn events have covered the judicial system, government and public policy, dentistry, and psychology. 

For Ely, the experience paid off. Not only did he pursue a computer science internship with Beta NXT, he used his resumé and interview skills to successfully obtain a summer staff position with Camp Anokijig in Plymouth, Wisconsin.