Should I address the gap in my resume or try to hide it?

Career Opportunities & Internships
1

I dropped out of college in my sophomore year due to poor grades. At the time, I did an impressive internship.

After I dropped out, my life got off track and I spent the next 5 years doing random jobs like tutoring and even tried some entrepreneurial ventures, with varying success.

I decided to go back to school after some maturity and got nearly all As in my upper level courses, made a big comeback and now I’m at a top 5 graduate program.

I want to get an internship this summer. If I include the internship from 5 years ago, that’s a big gap. If I don’t include it, I would have no “work experience” since I didn’t do any internship in the last 2 years in school. (I was focused on graduate school and grades).

Which one is better?

  1. Omit the previous internship and pretend I'm a recent grad who never worked.
  2. Include the past internship and explain the gap and how I overcame adversity and made a big comeback.Spin it positively

I’m leaning toward 2 because having no work experience might be worse than the gap. Beside, honesty is the best policy right?

2

How close is the old internship to the kind of jobs you are applying for now?

3

Pretty close. It was at a fortune 500 company too.

4

The size of the company isn’t what I was getting at, but rather how relevant is the company/work you did to the jobs you are applying for now. Fortune 500 includes Delta, Microsoft, Archer Daniels Midland, AIG, Merck and Morgan Stanley- pretty different industries. Would you be doing the same type of work as you did 5 years ago?

The point is that 5 year old internship experience won’t be interesting if it doesn’t have some relevance to the person who might be hiring you this time. Boeing is unlikely to care that you have pharma experience at Merck :slight_smile:

Either way, your CV should be honest, which may mean not playing up the internship, but not leaving it out. Do up your CV with everything in and take it to your careers office and ask them for how to improve it. There are ways to compress, group and otherwise rearrange a CV that tell your story in positive ways without being dishonest :slight_smile:

5

Address it if they ask about it.