ASU students might get to say goodbye to the typical printed copy résumé and say hello to a new online résumé with the introduction of the University's Merit Pages.
ASU is one of about 500 institutions that started to use the website meritpages.com to recognize students’ achievements. It allows institutions to give thousands of students recognition for all the accomplishments they do while enrolled. These pages will lay out a résumé-type page that students can use in the future.
ASU spokeswoman Sharon Keeler said it all started with the idea of getting out news regarding students achievements to the masses.
“What we wanted to do was handle a large value of student achievements,” she said. “Merit allows us to create one type of news release template for large stories (like the Dean’s List).”
Normally, to get the word out about an achievement, a typed press release has to be made and sent out for every student who receives it. This is an effective but slow process, Keeler said.
It takes time to make all the press releases and then send them out, limiting the amount of recognition students get for their achievements. With the help of Merit, ASU can showcase more students, Keeler added.
By uploading a spreadsheet with students information, Merit Pages will automatically create the merit achievement for them. The page allows students to share it on their social media networks, creating an online word-of-mouth, Keeler said.
The ASU Merit Page has issued 10 categories since its launch in January and has recognized 22,110 students thus far in different categories such as the Dean’s List, graduation, scholarships, study abroad awards and more.
More categories will be added as time comes, Keeler said.
“We're wanting to do every single story ... that involves student’s achievements,” she said. “Put it into this merit system and get it to their hometown newspapers.”
Students heard about their Merit Pages through an email in which they had to accept the invitation to the site. Once claimed, the page officially becomes the student's, Keeler said.
“The students that we have put in have really loved it,” she said.
Keeler said since ASU's launch on Merit, there have been more than 900,000 social media impressions. The impressions were calculated when the students’ friends and family shared, liked, commented and tweeted about it.
Keeler said 5,000 Facebook posts about the merits generated 22,000 likes.
Founder and President of Merit Pages Colin Mathews said the site allows colleges to promote and verify the great things students are doing, and it gives students a way to share those accomplishments with their social networks, employers or friends and family.
“The goal is for Merit (Pages) to be a résumé that creates itself for you, then ideally helps employers discover great people based on their accomplishments,” he said.
The differences between Merit Pages and sites such as LinkedIn is that the school, and eventually the employer, builds the page for the students, Mathews said. This gives students a great professional online presence, he added.
500 institutions in the U.S. are using Merit Pages to promote accomplishments for more than 2 million students every year, Mathews said.
As its popularity is growing, Merit Pages is looking to expand not only to other countries such as Canada, the U.K. and Australia, but to high schools as well, he said.
“It’s a way for high schools to see the accomplishments of older alumni, even for the high school to create pages for students who want them,” he said.
Mathews said some tools are being created so that students can add other activities they have done in the past and be recognized for it. Merit will contact the necessary organizations to verify the validity of those achievements and grant them upon the student's request.
Journalism freshman Taylor Seely, one of the recipients of the Dean’s List achievements, said it’s a nice gesture for ASU to do this.
“It’s really cool to have an organized page listing all your achievements,” she said. “I think it will be good for future employers.”
Reach the reporter at agloya@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @loyadriana
