Describe Your Education

Learn how to describe your studies to potential employers and more.

Remember, your degree doesn’t indicate how you focused your studies: it just says Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Sciences, or Bachelor of Arts and Sciences.

When you’re applying for jobs, it’s up to you to describe your course of study in a way that’s true to your academic work and helpful in getting the right job. Don’t sell yourself short: go beyond just Interdisciplinary Studies and talk about exactly what you’ve learned.

If you have eclectic interests and have gotten to your junior or senior year without seeing a big picture, that’s okay. You’re a complex person in a complex world! But you can also find ways to sum up what you’ve done so that you can communicate effectively about your studies.

You’re more than a major

You already have, or are currently learning, the essential skills that most employers are looking for—leadership, communication, problem solving, and teamwork.

When you're working on a resume or cover letter, think back over your work to those experiences. When did you work as a team? When did you take the lead on a project? Use your self-evaluations and faculty evaluations to discover and describe your strengths.

We can sit down with you and look at your evaluations, talk about your experiences, and help you figure out some ways to express what you’ve learned. You may also be able to use some of the language from your Academic Statement.

You can talk to a career advisor to help refine that work into a great cover letter or resume. We’ll help you translate the knowledge, skills, and abilities you’ve gained through your academic experiences into the language that employers are looking for.

Area of Emphasis

We can help you find ways to categorize and organize your past work by looking over your credit equivalencies with you. This can help you:

  • Determine an area of emphasis
  • Figure out what to put in job or grad school applications
  • Provide information you can use in your Academic Statement
  • Decide what to take next to fill in gaps or add depth

Before you make an appointment to meet with an advisor about your area of emphasis, you should fill out an Area of Emphasis worksheet (DOCX). Your advisor meeting will be much more productive if you’ve prepared by reviewing and thinking about your previous work. Then we can help you figure out how your courses and programs fit into categories and what it all means.

Contact an Advisor

Find a pattern in your education

If you’re not sure if your coursework so far can be described as an area of emphasis, talk to an advisor. A transcript review will help uncover patterns you didn’t even know were there.