The Problem with Resume Padding

“More extracurriculars and more leadership positions should grant me a better probability of going to the college of my choice.” As the college acceptance arena becomes increasingly competitive year after the year and the prevalence of “helicopter parents” starts to come further to its front stage, this newly-founded idea of padding up resumes is becoming increasingly commonplace among the minds of high-schoolers and their families as well. Padding resumes promotes this notion that actions such as going to Third World countries and snapping a few pictures with the natives should make a huge splash even if there’s no meaningful follow-up or insight from that adventure. On paper, it sounds like a masterful shortcut, but can such an inorganic padding of resumes actually boost chances of college acceptance?

Firstly, we shouldn’t ignorantly assume that college admissions officers will not see through this: they are actually chosen especially based on their ability to do so. An emerging trend connecting to the padding resume hypothesis is the creation of non-profit organizations that are run by high-schoolers and are supposed to stand in for a bulk of a student’s community service. According to The New York Times, Angel Perez, an admissions officer at the Trinity College in Hartford, stated that there were running jokes about non-profits or “mission trips” to less-privileged places in the world in the admissions office. Another admissions official, Jennifer Delahunty from Kenyon College, stated that mission-trip application essays actually get sorted into their group. The topic has become cliche and admissions officers now hold that students should be well-aware of socio-economic divides that are prevalent across the globe. However, some mission trips are definitely going to be sincere, so how can they differentiate between padding and genuine initiative? The application essays are reasonably expected to reflect a much richer understanding of the inter-workings of the environment the student was exposed to. Admissions officers acknowledge that quantity does not necessarily amount to quality and we should take heed of that when budgeting our time to activities we strive for just for the sake of padding up our resumes.

The whole notion of padding resumes is also profitable for colleges and college preparatory programs and provides quite the fuel for legally approved, money-making scandals. Branching off from the notion of resume padding directly, comes the theory that applying and partaking in summer school programs at the specific school in question should significantly increase the chance that the student lands in that school. There’s almost always some advertisement in famous magazines like Time or even online on academic-related sites that points to a summer enrichment program hosted at a big-name college as being the ultimate answer. The money raked in from these programs has exponentially increased in the past few years and even though the sponsors of these programs also created these opportunities for genuine and predominantly amazing informational purposes, they’re choosing now, notably the age of the “helicopter parents”, to strike the hardest to maximize the returns. According to The Guardian, Dean Skarlis, president of The College Advisor of New York, himself noted that such summer schools programs are obviously “revenue streams” and that “students should only attend if they’re really interested in the career area offered.” There’s no secret record of the students who apply for such programs at that school that’s being kept by the school for reference for future admissions processes; these are just educational programs simply designed for enhancing our knowledge in specific topics and taking our money as compensation.

Padding resumes is evidently a cheap, last-ditch attempt that’s even being utilized by summer enrichment programs sponsored by colleges and college preparatory programs to exploit families across the nation. It’s still probably impressive that you were at a summer internship at a hospital or on a trip to a foreign nation for some noble cause or out of an interest of some kind. But, colleges are clearly not just looking for initiative; they are looking for authenticity and initiative behind those layers of padding. In summary, it is beneficial to strive for leadership positions and to display initiative, but it’s better to do so in aspects where we feel an especially strong intrinsic calling to and not just a mere desire to blindly aim for the college we believe has the best brand.