Many universities ask for resumes from students as part of their application process. We thought it might be of interest of you guys to read about some of the techniques we have found successful candidates adopt in their resumes for applications. The ideas are what most of you must already be aware of. Its just a question of putting things in perspective and taking another look at it given that you are applying to a university for a graduate degree. Here are 10 tricks that might be useful:

1. Cover Letter: Depending on the application - you may or may not choose to write a cover letter. In most cases this is not required, but in cases when you do actually write a Cover Letter, try expanding on your most important qualifications and providing examples of why it is important for them to get into the program they are applying for - what the university can offer than and what they can offer in return.

2. Resume format: Try to keep your resume looking professional - without any out of the world fonts and sizes and bold/italic feature. Try using fonts like Arial or Times New Roman, black type and cream-colored paper.

3. Length: Try to be shorter than 2 pages - keep only the most relevant and recent work experiences and project works in it.

4. Focus on your contribution: In case of students with project experience at college and in case of professionals with work ex - try to bring out how each project contributed to the course/company - what you did in that project which made an impact in a big way - your contribution is something that the committee is going to look for.

5. Dont be too generic: Try to personalize your resume for each university - it doesnt have to be too different from other resumes you have written. But at least do not attempt to do a blind copy paste - many times people forget to replace the name of the university.

6. Negatives: Try not to bring out any thing negative on your resume. Try keeping away from any negative aspect in professional/academic life.

7. Personal Information: Sometimes i have seen resumes with a lot of personal information - which is a strict no-no. Do not try to score points with the admissions committee with things like ‘i like to race cars and blah blah’ - 1 sentence for personal information should be enough.

8. Spell-check: Please please do a spell check before you are about to send this resume over.

9. PDF or Doc: It might be better to send over a pdf - this is what i think - as you dont have a lot of spell check or grammatical error underlines.

10. False Information: Try not to go here - this can get you into serious trouble - especially in this age of google and facebook. Try keeping away from all of that.

Hope this helped all of you! Comments welcome..