If you are reading this you probably know how important resumes are. If you don’t, I’ll give you a quick overview.

What is a resume?

A resume is a document that represents you when you apply for internships, jobs, scholarships, and graduate school. This document also contains your contact information, experience, education information, and skills, among other things.

Resumes are important because they are usually used as the first filter for many scholarships, or job applications. If your resume is not good enough, many recruiters will not even give you a chance to prove yourself.

Get the right experience

In order to have a great resume, you need to show great experience. If you want an interview, you need a great resume. That’s why it is important to get the right experience to add it to your resume.

If you are a student, you should focus on gettings the following experiences:

Get an Internship

Do everything you can to land an internship early in college. If you graduate with a couple of internships under your belt, it is likely that you will find a good job after graduating.

Take classes with big coding projects

By doing this, you can get some technical experience before any formal work experience. The more relevant the project is to the real world, the better.

Work on side projects or extracurricular activities

Build something on your own time, get started with open source projects, participate in hackathons, or join student organizations. What matters is that you are coding or doing something related. Your initiative will impress companies and you will also learn technical or soft skills.

For ideas for side projects, click here.

For more information about extracurricular activities and how to get started, click here.

Guidelines

• Keep resume to one page. Exceptions are if you are applying to a teaching position, have a graduate degree, or at least 10 years of work experience.
• Be consistent. Use the same font type and size (9.5-12pt) throughout the resume, with exception of your name that should have a bigger font size (16-18pt). Use 0.5-1 inch margins.
• Use bold, italics, and underlining to make important things stand out. Be consistent with this.
• Remove the objective. You don’t need it.
• Check your grammar!
• Avoid personal pronouns. Everything should be written in third person.
• Don’t use symbols or pictures if you are applying online. Many companies rely on applicant tracking systems (ATS) to filter out candidates. According to The Muse, an online career advice resource, you need to keep the format as simple as possible because of the ATS. You can take a look at the original article: Beat the Robots: How to Get Your Resume Past the System & Into Human Hands.
• Don’t use more than three bullet points for each experience.
• Every sentence should begin with an action verb. Here is a list of action verbs: List of Action Verbs for Resumes & Professional Profiles

Sections

Personal Information

• Do not include information about religion, race/ethnicity, or marital status. Companies aren’t allowed to ask that, so do not include it.
• Do not include your mailing address.
• Do include:
  • Name (big font size)
  • Email address (personal email address is preferred, but your school email address also works)
  • Phone number
  • LinkedIn account (optional)
  • Github account (optional)

Education

• Do include:
  • School name (e.g. University of Texas at El Paso)
  • Degree name (e.g. Bachelor of Science in Computer Science)
  • GPA. Include the higher of your cumulative GPA and your major GPA. If they’re both less than 3.0, leave it off.
  • Graduation date

Professional Experience

• Only include relevant positions. The ones that make you a more impressive candidate. You should not list every single work position you have ever held. If you are a freshman or have no professional experience, it is okay to have older information.
• Write strong bullets.
  • Discuss accomplishments, not job descriptions. Use this approach “Accomplished X by implementing Y which led to Z” or just show what you did, how you did it, and what the results were.
  • Try to make the results measurable.
  • Example: Plan and coordinate panels on public health for audiences of 25–50 undergraduates on a bi-monthly basis

Projects

• Include your 2-4 most significant projects.
• State which languages or technologies were used and whether it was a personal or school project. Personal projects are preferred over school projects because it shows initiative.
• It is okay if you are not working on any personal projects, just be sure to add your school projects. The important thing is to be building something.

Skills

• List all the technical skills that you have (Software, Operating Systems, Databases, etc)
• Software: do not list Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)
• List languages with experience level: Java (expert), C++ (proficient), Python (intermediate), JavaScript (prior experience)

Volunteer Experience

• List your membership type and contributions in student organizations. Be active, even if you are not an officer!
• List all your leadership and community service experiences.

Honors/Awards

• List all your scholarships, honors, and awards, and when you received them.

Samples

Some of the following samples do not follow the guidelines and tips offered in this article. You can use any of them as examples, but we advice to adjust your resume to follow our tips and guidelines.

Samples from different schools:

• University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
• Boston College (BC)
• University of California, Davis – Freshman
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Nova Southeastern University