Making a student resume is the finest method for communicating your experience and skills with business owners, whether you’re searching for a professional option after graduating from college, having to apply for an internship, or searching for employment while you finish your studies.
Composing a student resume is difficult, but so is searching for employment as a student. The major difficulty continues to be the same: there is a lot of competition, and it appears that everyone has far more experience in the industry than you. An excellent student resume will be required to attract employers and get your feet on the ground.
What is a student resume?
A student resume, often referred to as a “student’s CV” (curriculum vitae) or simply a “student CV,” is a document that summarizes a student’s educational background, academic achievements, extracurricular activities, skills, and any relevant work experience. It is typically used by students who are applying for part-time jobs, internships, co-op programs, scholarships, or entry-level positions. A well-crafted student resume aims to highlight the individual’s qualifications and potential despite limited professional experience.
Here are key elements typically included in a student resume:
- Contact Information: Include your name, phone number, email address, and possibly your home address. Ensure that your contact information is up-to-date and professional.
- Objective or Summary: A brief statement at the beginning of the resume that outlines your career goals, academic achievements, and what you hope to achieve in the position you’re applying for. Alternatively, you can use a “Summary of Qualifications” section to highlight key skills and experiences.
- Education: List your educational institutions in reverse chronological order (starting with the most recent). Include the name of the school, location, graduation date (or expected graduation date), degree pursued, major, and any relevant honors or awards.
- Relevant Coursework: If you’re a student with limited work experience, you can include a section that highlights specific courses or projects that are relevant to the position you’re applying for. This demonstrates your knowledge and skills.
- Work Experience: Include any part-time jobs, internships, volunteer work, or freelance work you’ve undertaken. Provide details about your responsibilities, achievements, and the dates you worked. Focus on transferable skills and experiences that relate to the job you’re seeking.
- Skills: Highlight your technical skills (e.g., computer programming languages, software proficiency) and soft skills (e.g., communication, teamwork, problem-solving). Tailor this section to match the job requirements.
- Extracurricular Activities: Mention involvement in clubs, organizations, sports teams, or any leadership roles you’ve held in school. This can showcase your teamwork, leadership, and time management skills.
- Awards and Honors: Include any academic or non-academic awards, scholarships, or honors you’ve received. This demonstrates your dedication and accomplishments.
- References: While not always necessary on a student resume, you can include references or state that they are available upon request. Ensure you have permission from your references before sharing their contact information.
- Optional Sections: Depending on your experiences, you may include additional sections such as certifications, languages spoken, research projects, publications, or hobbies and interests.
When creating a student resume, remember to tailor it to the specific job or opportunity you’re applying for. Emphasize the skills and experiences that are most relevant to the position. Additionally, proofread carefully to ensure there are no typos or errors in your resume. A well-crafted student resume can help you stand out to potential employers or academic institutions and showcase your potential, even if you have limited work experience.
Nine student resume-writing tips
Below are nine student resume writing tips:
- Select the best student resume format.
- Create a tracking system for applicants (ATS)
- Provide professional contact details
- Provide a professional or unbiased overview.
- Following your overview; enumerate your academics.
- Provide practical qualifications
- Provide applicable courses.
- Enumerate required skills
- Check your student resume for errors.
1. Select the best student resume format.
Prospective hiring managers will look at your student resume for a limited period, typically only a few seconds. The quicker it is for them to inspect your student resume, the more likely you are to keep their focus. The following student resume segments will be of particular interest to most hiring managers and employers:
- Name and contact details
- Education and accomplishments
- Work experience
- Skill sets and experiences that are relevant
To eliminate information overload, the ideal student resume formats are well arranged with the most applicable information to make effective use of white space.
Pick a good simple layout that enables you to highlight the academic credentials that are particularly pertinent to the position posting to make sure your strengths and achievements are noticeable. Contemplate including extra segments that may be useful to business owners, such as appropriate skills, prizes, accomplishments, or career aspirations, to remove empty spaces.
The sequential resume template is suggested for displaying your qualifications to business owners as university students or fresh graduates. With this template, you can display your most sensitive details first.
2. Create an applicant tracking system (ATS)
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is software that businesses utilize to evaluate, rate, and organize application forms for employment or internship postings. An ATS selects and rates resumes based on their utilization of the employment posting’s specified keywords. Resumes with the fewest keywords or ones that are not structured for an ATS are rated the lowest.
The following are overall standard procedures for composing an ATS-friendly resume:
- Review the employment description for personality characteristics and abilities required to succeed in the position.
- Compile a list of keywords from the desired and needed qualifications enumerated.
- Use basic titles like Expertise, Education, and Skills.
- Avoid using complicated formatting elements like pictures, columns, graphs, crossbars, and footnotes.
When seeking employment online, use a Word document. It could be enticing to send in a PDF version because it does not require your formatting to be readjusted, but not every ATS can detect this format correctly.
3. Provide professional contact details
A segment at the edge of your student resume should contain your name, contact details, and a link to your LinkedIn profile or webpage, if you currently have one, should be the first item hiring managers see. Include the following in this segment:
- Name and surname
- State and city
- Contact number currently in use
- An email address that is up-to-date and professional
Your original contact details should ideally occupy one to two lines on the page, just below your name at the top. Your name, in 16 to 18-point typeface, ought to be the biggest title on the page. To enumerate your address, use the Town, State template; there is no need to add your physical location on your student resume. Keep in mind that your resume isn’t a legally binding document, so choose whatever name accurately suits you and what you’d like to be called all through the recruiting process and, ultimately, at work.
The following is an example of a contact details segment:
Sally Robinson
480 Broad Street •Dallas, Texas
sallyrobinson@email.com •555-102-1485 •sallyrobinson.portfolio.net
Make use of professional contact details. Hiring managers will recognize your professional standards, so use your university or college e-mail moniker or build a professional email that includes your first and surname, like firstname.lastname@yahoo.com. Write a professional notification for your voice message as well.
4. Provide a professional or unbiased overview
This declaration, also known as a “professional aspirations,” “resume overview,” or “unbiased declaration,” appears beneath your contact details and is typically characterized by one to two lines that summarize your short-term career ambitions and why you’re looking for work. Your aspirational description must be concise and precise to your present career-related knowledge and acquired skills. Limit this segment to 50 words or 2 to 3 lines.
Here’s an illustration of a professional statement:
“New graduate of a well-regarded literary works program with wide variations classwork and experience in business and academic writing proofreading and editing. Talented at using numerous style guidelines (APA, AP, MLA) and looking for a job that will require me to utilize these skills daily.”
This illustration is below 50 words long, contains only the most important information about the candidate, and highlights the applicant’s user experience and possible benefits to the organization.
Make your overview specific to the employer. List the skill sets mentioned in the job advertisement and your interest in working for their organization. This shows the recruiter that you have read the job requirements, understand the necessary qualifications for their position, and are emphasizing that information immediately.
5. Following your overview; enumerate your academics
Your academic segment is where you will show recruiters that you’re studying skills that will assist you on the job. Consider creating it as one of your resume’s first segments.
Even if your studies appear unconnected to the corporate world, your dedication to academic achievement can clearly show a desire to continuously upgrade and a strong commitment to work. Enumerate pertinent courses you’ve finished, your Grade point (whether it’s 3.5 or higher), and crucial bodies of knowledge. Your academic segment should include the following items:
- Your institution’s name
- Your university’s location
- The degree you’re working on (if suitable)
- Your major(s) of study
- The year of your graduating from college (if suitable)
- Your grade point average (Please bear in mind: You could choose not to include this if it isn’t greater than 3.5.)
- Medal of honor or educational appreciation, schoolwork, tasks, or other accomplishments collected all through your schooling
Below is an example:
University of Honolulu, 2022
Bachelor of Science in Philosophy
Philosophy Management Fundamentals, Carroll Campbell
Include your foreseeable or presumed graduation date if you are yet to graduate. Only include the month and the year; the dates you were admitted are not required.
6. Provide practical qualifications
You are not required to restrict your experience segment to salaried jobs. Include voluntary roles, internships, and extracurriculars when you’re unfamiliar with the employment market and don’t have numerous job roles to share. These experiences can demonstrate that you possess the necessary abilities to excel in the role for which you are applying. For instance, your experience as the coach of a baseball team shows leadership potential, whereas your experience as chairperson of a student organization shows managerial skills.
If you’ve had any salaried work experience or pertinent internships, list them first, followed by the company’s name, the location, and the period(s) you did an internship. After which, in between two and three main points, showcase your accomplishments with descriptive words while in those roles. Where necessary, provide any quantifiable accomplishments you had with figures. For instance, your experience segment could look like this:
Metropolitan Editorial Solutions | April – August 2022
Press Statement Editing Intern
- Orchestrated a three-person team of interns to edit received press statements promptly.
- Structures for AP guide strategy to deadlines were established.
- I worked with the team to apply editorial regulations, which cut the time it took to print by 30%.
7. Provide applicable courses
It’s possible that you won’t have a significant amount of work experience to include when you begin writing a professional student resume. Consider including classwork related to the position or internship you’re trying to apply for to enable potential employees to know the skills you’re growing and also why you’d be a suitable candidate for the position. Template the subject and school names like you would your job experience underneath your working experience, and include information such as relevant academic assignments, important subjects learned, and personal accomplishments.
Example
News reporting Principles, Private College I, Summer 2021
- I learned about the governing values and principles of journalistic ethics.
- When confronted with an ethical issue, I established and abided by a reasonable method for deciding how to move ahead.
- At the close of the semester, I described rationalization for choices to editors, classmates, and guest viewers.
8. Provide applicable courses.
When a recruiter looks over your student resume, they want to know why you’d be a great asset to their organization. Enumerating your skill sets is a faster method for demonstrating your ability to achieve success in the position. Include a mix of hard skills (those acquired via experience and education such as software applications or different languages) as well as soft skills (i.e., personal characteristics and skills that are transferable to any employment, such as problem-solving & time management).
If you’re having difficulty deciding which skills to include, consider the following:
- What are your achievements and triumphs? What characteristics, abilities, or skill sets aided you in accomplishing this?
- What abilities do your friends, relatives, and schoolmates believe you possess?
- Are there any characteristics or skills that professionals in the profession you’re applying for frequently possess? Do you also have those?
Here’s an illustration of what a computer programmer might include in the skills segment on their student resume:
Coding languages
Java I Ajax I Hypertext preprocessor I Scripting I Python I PHP code I HTML I Query language
Additional Skillsets
I am a highly coordinated critical thinker. Outstanding skills in time management
Examine the position description to determine the competencies and behaviors necessary to succeed. The desired and needed skills are frequently used as ATS keywords to easily spot qualified applicants.
9. Check your student resume for errors.
Spell-check your student resume before submitting it to the internet and mailing it to a hiring manager. Take a breather before proofreading your resume. Following the completion of your resume, it is popular for you to sift through the document and peruse it in the order in which you plan to compose it. It’s popular to overlook misspellings or odd phrases when proofreading your resume, so take a moment or get a good night of sleep before doing so.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a well-prepared student resume serves as a powerful tool for showcasing your academic achievements, skills, and potential to prospective employers, internships, scholarships, or academic programs. While you may have limited work experience, your resume can effectively communicate your dedication, extracurricular involvement, and your ability to contribute positively to future opportunities. Remember that a carefully crafted student resume, customized to your goals and the specific positions you’re applying for, can make a significant difference in your journey toward academic and professional success.
Frequently Asked Questions About Student Resumes
Here are five frequently asked questions about student resumes:
- What should a student include in their resume if they have limited work experience?
Students with limited work experience should focus on their educational achievements, coursework, relevant projects, extracurricular activities, volunteer work, and any internships or part-time jobs, even if they are not directly related to the desired position. Emphasize transferable skills such as teamwork, leadership, and problem-solving.
- How long should a student resume be?
Student resumes should generally be one page in length. Since students typically have shorter work histories, it’s important to keep the document concise and focused on the most relevant information.
- Is it necessary to include a GPA on a student’s resume?
Including your GPA is optional. If your GPA is strong (typically 3.0 or higher), and it’s relevant to the job or program you’re applying for, you can include it. However, if your GPA is low or not directly related to the position, you may choose to omit it.
- Should students tailor their resume for each job or application?
Yes, students should tailor their resumes for each job or opportunity they apply to. Customize the resume to match the specific requirements and qualifications outlined in the job posting or scholarship application. Highlight experiences and skills that align with the position.
- How can a student make their resume stand out to potential employers or academic institutions?
To make a student resume stand out, emphasize achievements and experiences that demonstrate your passion, dedication, and skills. Use action verbs, quantify accomplishments where possible, and focus on relevant coursework, projects, and extracurricular activities. Also, ensure that your resume is well-organized, error-free, and visually appealing.
These frequently asked questions provide guidance to students on how to create effective resumes that showcase their strengths, even in the absence of extensive work experience. Customization, clarity, and a focus on transferable skills are key to crafting a compelling student resume.