The Anti-Resume Project

Overview

In a society that values achievement and growth, many students in competitive colleges can feel intense pressure to constantly advance and succeed. This pressure can often lead to mental health problems, imposter syndrome, destructive perfectionism, and what is colloquially known as “Penn Face” – a façade that students put up to mask their underlying struggles. In an effort to break down this cultural stigma of failure and vulnerability, the Anti-Resume Project was born. 

This project was launched in the spring of 2018, and we update its content on an annual basis.

Target Users

Current and former undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, where this culture of perfectionism is very prominent.

My Role

I was the co-lead of the Anti-Resume Project, which was one of many projects of The Signal organization. In addition to creating the project roadmap and delegating responsibilities to the 6 members of my team, I was also the web developer of the project and built the project website in collaboration with the project’s designer. I also helped the marketing team promote the project through different channels.

The Problem

As students ourselves, I and the other contributors of the Anti-Resume Project reflected on our own experiences and needs in order to determine how to best design and implement the final product. Common issues with the culture at the University of Pennsylvania that the student body has raised over the past few years include:

• Cut-throat competition: Penn students generally tend to be overachievers and thus compete fiercely in academics, job recruiting, and social status.

• Extremely pre-professional culture: as a school that is highly focused on post-graduate employment, students feel pressured to engage in pre-professional activities ranging from resume-building to finding internships starting from their first day of school.

• A lack of mental health support: though steps have been taken to improve this aspect of Penn life, there is still a cultural stigma against seeking therapy and mental health services.

• Penn Face: students are afraid to fail and show vulnerabilities and thus put up a facade of nonchalance.

• Peer pressure: students find themselves constantly comparing themselves to each other, and social media exacerbates this pressure by making it very easy to publicize student accomplishments.

Project Goal

Based on these insights, we concluded that our project needed to focus on the root cause of many of these problems: the fear of failure. In order to change a culture, we realized we needed to mobilize students to collectively break down this stigma through open discussion and sharing of failures. We decided that the best medium for this movement was the Internet - we wanted to harness the very medium that was exacerbating the problem and use it to create and spread more encouraging content.

Ideation

Our first step was to create mockups on Figma of student profiles featuring their failures, using the layout of other profile pages (like LinkedIn and resumes) as inspiration.

One early concern we encountered was that the project would be too negative if it solely focused on failure. We wanted the tone of our project to be encouraging and optimistic; the project should help students contextualize their failures and continue to explore new things outside their comfort zone. Thus, we ultimately decided to add underrated achievements as a separate section to each profile so that students could celebrate obstacles that they had overcome outside of their professional lives.

Earlier versions also included adding timelines or audio snippets to enhance the storytelling aspect of the project. We ended up discarding these elements because we wanted the format of each profile to be as simple as possible and easily recognizable as a mock LinkedIn page to facilitate ease of use and sharing.

The Product

The main product of the Anti-Resume Project is a website that features a collection of “anti-resumes” – mock LinkedIn student profiles that list out their various failures and accomplishments that wouldn’t normally appear on a resume.

In deciding what content to display on the website, we chose to first solicit anti-resumes from young alumni and seniors because:

• Alumni and seniors are often role models for undergraduate students, especially underclassmen, so it would be more impactful to see that these successful people had also failed often and overcome great adversity.

• Viewers of the Anti-Resume Project were more likely to have a personal connection with recent grads and seniors, which would make them more likely to want to read their anti-resumes.

Failure at Penn

Upon receiving overwhelming positive feedback from students following our initial launch, we decided to take it one step further and add the element of offline, in-person discussion to the project. 

We asked a panel of nine graduating Penn seniors to speak in a 2-hour event on campus about the struggles they faced during their four years at Penn. Our panel featured outstanding individuals including a Rhodes Scholar, our Undergraduate Assembly president, and a nationally-ranked speedskater. During the event, we showed a video that featured seniors’ answers to the question, “What is failure to you?” which was followed by a deep Q&A session with the panel of seniors. It was an important addition to the Anti-Resume Project because it added an element of storytelling and face-to-face interaction while providing a physical safe space for participants to be open and vulnerable about their struggles.

Since then, other initiatives have appeared throughout Penn that strive to achieve the same goal of destigmatizing failure and vulnerability, including Stories of Failure and The Other Side of Me.

Impact & Reception

Success Metrics

• A high volume of participants and page views

• Positive testimonies from participants and viewers of the project

By the Numbers

• Over 6,000 page views on the Anti-Resume website since our launch in March 2019

• Over 200 attendees at Failure at Penn

• 20 anti-resume submissions in 2019 and over 40 anti-resume submissions in 2020

User Feedback

Many students - a mix of Penn upperclassmen and underclassmen as well as students at other colleges - reached out to me personally about the impact of the project on their lives, saying that they were very inspired by the project because:

1. it encouraged them to keep going when they were struggling through college or job recruitment and

2. it humanized the upperclassmen that submitted the profiles; many of these upperclassmen were seen as conventionally successful, but it was surprising and reassuring to see that they also had to overcome many obstacles along the way.

Media Coverage

“Students create 'anti-resumes' to normalize failure at Penn” (interview by The Daily Pennsylvanian)

“‘Asking for help doesn’t make you weak’: seniors share stories of failure at Penn” (interview by the Daily Pennsylvanian)

“The Anti-Resume: Redefining Success” (interview by The Art of Failure Podcast)

Moving Forward

There is still much that can be done to improve the culture at Penn and other colleges. 

On the technical side, improvements can be made to the user flow by building a submission form directly in the website rather than using Google Forms and by formalizing the storage of student profile data. The anti-resume team is currently working on a website redesign.

Next steps for project growth include expanding the project to include older alumni, who are often seen as more conventionally successful than new graduates, and expanding to other campuses where these types of cultural problems also exist.