Objectives for Resumes for Scholarships

A resume is a short document that provides details of your experiences. Scholarship committees often request a copy of your resume to fill them in on all of your work, academic and extracurricular activities. The objective you use when writing a resume for a scholarship is different from one you write when you are looking for a job. Resumes often include your GPA, work experience, contact information, high school education, academic achievements, community service roles or volunteer work you have completed, memberships to organizations and extracurriculars, and can also include a personal statement or “About Me.”

These resumes can be used for scholarship applications in many ways, whether it’s for your Bachelor’s degree funding, a Master’s degree application, or a part-time job. Your student resume can include a work experience section, listing previous or recent jobs you have completed with the accurate dates and tasks you had while working. It can also include an education section focusing on what you have done as a college student, like your Dean’s List achievements, graduation date, academic experiences and certifications, honor society inclusions, leadership roles, internship experience, and volunteer experience you had in your time with higher education.

Student resumes can also include a cover letter for scholarship applications, as they detail what the student hopes to use the scholarship for and how it can benefit their education in the long-run. There are many scholarship resume samples online and on LinkedIn for scholarship essay use, and these can often also be helpful for college admission overall. Selection committees, or scholarship committee members, will review your cover letter, resume and experience for the needed scholarship, so make sure to proofread your work before sending.

Information can be separated into sections, with bullet points, headers or headings for each section, reverse chronological order, and other parts to a professional resume or college scholarship resume. Resume builders can help you with example sections and resume formats, as well as resume writing tips for beginners, like high school students.

Job

When you write a resume for a job, you include what job you want to obtain. You also write a little about your past professional experiences and your qualifications for the job. For example, if your objective is to be an administrative assistant in a nonprofit organization, you might write, “Experienced executive secretary seeks position as administrative assistant in a nonprofit environment, where my organizational and cost-cutting skills can make a positive difference in the wider community.”

Scholarship

A scholarship resume’s objective focuses on the fact that you want money to go to college. It can be broader in scope, however, than one written for a job. You can tell the scholarship committee about your intended major in the objective statement, if you have decided on one. If you know your career goals, you could include them, too. You might write, “Student in anthropology with two study abroad experiences and a semester-long field internship seeks funds to continue graduate education at ABC University. I plan to pursue a career in archaeology, studying the pottery of Southwest Native Americans.” However, one thing that job and scholarship resumes have in common is that they both tell the person reading the resume why the writer deserves the end goal, whether it is a job or money for college.

Concise

Keep your objective to fewer than three lines of text, just as you would in an objective statement for a job. The objective is short, sweet and to the point. It tells the scholarship committee why you want the money, and what you plan to do with it in just a few sentences.

Confident

Being confident that you are worthy of the scholarship is vital to convey in the resume objective. Avoid sounding like you are whining that you have had a hard life. Instead, emphasize your skills and your future career goals. For example, write, “I want to win the XYZ Scholarship to further my education in biology. I plan to pursue a career in medical research upon graduation.”