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Restorer · Posted: Sun May 04, 2008 11:33 pm Post subject: Disparate Education Dates

I'm unsure of the best way to express my education timeline on my resume. Because of poor performance at school because of illness, I was forced to take a couple breaks from enrollment at my university. During the current break in enrollment, I enrolled in classes at two different community colleges. My timeline looks something like this (college names left out):

Fall 2003 - Summer 2005: University
June 2005 - May 2006: working a job
Summer 2006: University (summer session)
Fall 2006: University (see note below)
January 2007 - September 2007: doing nothing relevant
October 2007 - December 2007: Community College #1
January 2008 - May 2008: Community College #2
- at this point, everything below is planned -
June 2008 - September 2008: University (summer)
Fall 2008 and later: University (if readmitted)

Note: because of my continuing illness, I failed every single class I took in Fall 2006 at the University, which is as good as having not enrolled in the first place.

So, I'm not sure how to lay this out on my resume without filling up too much space or setting off Big Red Lights. I'm tempted to leave out the Fall 2006 classes and just leave a gap in education from Summer 2005 to October 2007. I'd be much more comfortable explaining the gap in an interview or cover letter.

lexa10881 · Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 4:18 am Post subject:

I would list them in chunks and not list the jobs in there at all. I would list the jobs in a separate section. You may elaborate at the interview, but I would not do it in a cover letter. If you changed courses of study you could also attribute part of the changes to this, if you wanted to. But I would list the education and job sections separately for sure.

http://www.cvtips.com/education_in_your_resume.html

Restorer · Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 4:14 am Post subject:

Right, I wasn't considering combining education with work experience on my resume. I only included it in the timeline to show that I actually was doing something during that period, to emphasize the complete lack of anything relevant during the second large gap in 2007. My question is more about how best to present the education section, and whether consistency is more important than condensing the information to make it fit.

Here is how I wrote my education section as of October 2006:
Note: the code tag doesn't display in a monospaced font as it should, so I can't align the example as I meant to. Depending on your individual font settings, the below might not line up correctly. It's supposed to be two columns.

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