How to reflect unusual/difficult life in resume?

Hi all,

Please tear my resume apart. I have a BA from a good but obscure UK school and I'm starting a one-year MSc UK top-5 in September to prove my quant skills, with a view to go into operations or strategy consulting. One option is to do the MSc part-time over two years and intern to overcome the lack of brands on my CV.

There is one thing that I feel I should include but the format doesn't allow it. I'm British but lived in an exciting developing country for ten years. I left home for a year when I was 13, back with my parents when I was 14, then dropped out of high school at moved to London at 17. My parents stayed behind and I supported myself financially in manual jobs, put myself through night school while doing long hours in a restaurant kitchen, got to university and continued to work part-time in term-time and full time over the holidays. It's not especially relevant to consulting but I feel that it demonstrates grit so I should get some credit for it - what do you guys think? The best I could do was include Arabic literacy in the skills section and hope I can segue from that in an interview but I'm concerned that I wouldn't get that far. On the other hand, will the unusual stuff just freak them out?

Hopefully you can make sense of the redaction (brackets are from the original, square brackets are where I've paraphrased)

Thanks for taking the time - I'd really appreciate any suggestions

http://www.razume.com/documents/25888

 

That's what the cover letter is for, isn't it? If you include it in your cover letter your interviewer will likely bring it up during the interview, and if not, you can bring it up in response to 'fit questions', e.g. questions about "facing hardships" or "difficult situations". I wouldn't worry about "freaking them out", it's admirable to overcome difficult situations, and people who have never encountered difficulty tend to burn out at an alarming rate the first time they do.

 

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