OWU Career Connection is committed to assisting Student-Athletes. We understand the demanding nature of your schedule as you manage a full academic workload, campus commitments, and student employment, all while dedicating extensive hours to practice and competition in your sport. We acknowledge that being a student-athlete can pose challenges when it comes to integrating career exploration and planning into your already packed schedule. This community aims to offer valuable information, advice, and resources to help you navigate the balance of these diverse priorities. Learn how to effectively leverage and communicate your experiences as a student-athlete in your journey towards career planning!
Career Connection and Student Athletes
Playing a sport at the collegiate level can be time and energy intensive. You might be wondering how you can showcase and leverage that effort to a potential employer or graduate program. See below!
Make sure a potential employer or graduate school recognizes all that you offer as an athlete!
Where do I put my athletic involvement on my resume? In most cases, you’ll want to list your Athletic involvement in you Campus Leadership and Involvement section of your resume, formatted like your work experiences:
OWU Sports Team | Position Month Year – Present
- Traditional bullet content (Action Verb + Transferable Skill + Result)
What are some transferable skills and experiences to talk about in my bullets? One of the main reasons we get involved in sports at a young age is to build skills like leadership, communication, grit, strategic thinking, time-management, and the list goes on! Here are a few key competencies to consider adding to your resume.
| Communication | Time Management | Teamwork |
| Leadership | Resiliency | Ethics |
| Accountability | Discipline | Goal Setting and Assessment |
| Competitiveness | Critical Thinking | Motivating Others |
| Performing Under Pressure | Adaptability | Focus |
What would a strong bullet look like?
You will want to begin with a strong action verb, quantify your experience when appropriate, make sure your transferable skill is highlighted in a logical and professional way, include keywords from a job listing and demonstrate the results of performing this skill well.
OWU Football Team| Linebacker Month Year – Present
- Maintain excellent academic performance while also devoting an additional 10+ hours per week to practices, meets, team building exercises and self improvement.
- Communicate effectively with 10 team members to ensure exceptional team performance and execute complex plays.
- Demonstrate strong adaptability through assessment in a fast-paced environment to make critical decisions quickly with team mates and coach input.
- Encourage academic, athletic and personal growth through mentoring 3 elementary age students through the athletic program’s mentoring program.
There are many ways to incorporate your athletic prowess during an interview! When considering how to answer interview questions, we often recommend students employ the ‘STAR’ model. Here’s a quick review of how you can incorporate your athletic skills and experiences in it:
Example Question: What do you consider some of your greatest strengths?
- S – Situation – You want to go through your mental rolodex of experiences in athletics that might apply to the question and briefly describe the situation. Let’s say you want to highlight your organizational and time management skills as an athlete – you can explain what sport you play(ed), how many hours that took and what organizational challenges you had to address.
- T – Task – Take a moment to point out the specific tasks you had to achieve success. This helps your interviewer understand your role and the responsibilities you had to take on.
- A – Action – Go into detail about the decisions or actions you had to take to ensure that you succeeded. In this example you had to prioritize certain responsibilities, keep careful track of test, presentation, game and assignment dates. This gives your interviewer insight into your problem-solving abilities, working style, decision-making, and more.
- R – Result – You define what success looked like for you as a result of your own action! These can be negative too – a failure is only a failure if you learned nothing from it and talking about a time something didn’t go the way you planned can inadvertently demonstrate resilience. Please ensure that you thoroughly discuss the result, and even your take-away from the result.
Ultimately, your answer might end up looking something like this:
“That’s a great question! I believe that two of my greatest strengths are my strong organizational and time-management skills. From my experience as an athlete, I traveled during the semester to games, and practices were nearly everyday. I did this all while carrying a full course load, and I made sure to keep a detailed planner to keep track of my assignments and commitments. In the end, I succeeded at maintaining a high GPA, all while performing to the best of my ability as an athlete.”
