We are incredibly thrilled to introduce a new Aspire series to you, Application Tips & Tricks. Its purpose is to help you craft the best application for any opportunity, including Aspire.
First stop? How to create a successful CV.
Thus, we’ve asked some of our Alumni how they see this, and rest assured as their answers will provide some valuable insights to guide you in the process.
For the first part of the CV series, we’ve asked Alexandru Mosinschi, one of our beloved Alumni, to answer a few questions. Besides his great work at Aspire, Alex is a UCL student who’s passionate about policymaking and global diplomacy, and also entrepreneurship. Prepare to be motivated!
1. In your opinion, what are the most important 3 elements every successful CV must have?
• having your CV tailored to the particular industry or field of activity that you’re applying for is so important. This does not mean necessarily including all your skills or all the activities you are part of, because that would make it too long and too unreadable;
• secondly, I think that a successful CV should be engaging from start to finish and this means not having an overlength CV – so probably a maximum of two pages is the best;
• last but not least, I think that within each activity you list in your resume, you have to summarise the information very well. This is a key trait that sticks off in a successful CV. A trick for me is that I think about the story of one activity and break it down into several bullet points. Then, I try to summarize each bullet point and provide some context for the recruiter, because they might not understand something that for you makes sense, so give them context and try to have a balance between providing context and unnecessary details;
2. What is the best advice/feedback you have ever received regarding your CV?
I think that the best piece of advice that I received was to structure my activities by the skills that I acquired, and by skills that I shall case for being there, for example, for every job, internship, or volunteering activity I just have 2 bullet points with 2 main skills;
3. If you were to change anything about how your CV looks/presents itself now, what would that be?
• one would be extra skills and projects that I have at the bottom where I pretty much listed everything that I didn’t know where to put;
• the education section – the problem for me is that I have some high school and university projects, like being a student academic representative at university is something that I don’t know where to list on my resume because is not actually work experience and it’s not volunteering either, as I have only done it for a few months and there is not much to talk about but is still something worth mentioning. Then, I also have at the end of my university section these random projects, like a society that I’m part of. This will be something I will change if I have an idea of how to do it more creatively without overloading the educational part with these extra projects;
