Essential Resume Tips for College Students and New Grads

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Applying for jobs or internships as a college student or recent grad and wondering how to craft the perfect resume?

I’ve reviewed hundreds of entry-level resumes as a hiring manager for a prestigious postgraduate fellowship, an adviser to first-years and sophomores looking to land their first internship, and a researcher investigating the impact of extracurricular involvement on college success.

Here’s what I want to see on your resume — and what I think you can skip.

Resume sections

1. Contact information

Your full name, phone number, and email address should appear at the top of your resume so that employers know who you are and how to contact you. Feel free to use the name you want to go by at work even if it’s not your legal name. If applicable, you can also provide links to your LinkedIn profile, GitHub profile, website, and portfolio in this section.

In general, you should not include a photograph of yourself, personal details (e.g., date of birth, gender, marital status, or nationality), links to personal social media accounts such as Instagram, or your home address on your resume when applying to jobs in the United States.

2. Education

As a college student or recent grad, your education is one of your most compelling qualifications, so it should appear in a prominent position near the top of your resume. Once you have several years of professional experience, this section can be moved lower down on your resume.

Include the name of your school, your school’s location (city and state, or city and country if outside the United States), the name of your degree (e.g., Bachelor of Arts), and your major or specialization. Indicate the year (and month, if you like) that you completed your degree or expect to graduate if you are still in school (e.g., “Anticipated June 2025” or “Expected December 2024”) so that employers understand where you are in your education and when you are available to work. Some resume experts recommend leaving your graduation year off of your resume, but this is typically to avoid age discrimination (bias against job applicants and employees over age 40) when you are further along in your career.

If you have attended multiple colleges or universities, list them in reverse chronological order, with the most recent at the top. If you studied abroad during college and want to include the foreign institution where you studied on your resume, list it after your primary degree-granting institution. Don’t include your high school.

Other details that you might consider listing in the education section include your GPA (only if it’s above 3.5 on a 4.0 scale), awards and honors (e.g., Dean’s List), senior thesis or capstone project title, and the names of any highly relevant courses you took in college (e.g., if the job posting mentions that you should be familiar with linear algebra and calculus, you could list your relevant mathematics coursework here) — but only include this information if you are confident it will strengthen your application. Academic accolades matter more in some fields than others, so read the job description carefully and try to do some research about the company to get a sense for whether additional information about your education would strengthen your candidacy or if it would just take up space.

3. Experience

Write down all of the jobs you’ve held — including part-time jobs, internships, and co-ops — in reverse chronological order, starting with your current or most recent job at the top. (You don’t need to — and generally shouldn’t — include every job you’ve ever had on the resume you send to employers, but it’s often easier to start with a longer list and then edit it down.) Include your job title, the name and location (city and state) of your employer, and the dates you worked there (months and years, e.g., June 2023-August 2023).

The job title you list on your resume doesn’t need to match your official job title verbatim, but it should be close enough to avoid problems at the employment verification or reference checking stage. For example, it’s generally fine to list your job title as “Sales Associate” if your official job title on your employment paperwork was “Associate” and you did sales, or “Research Assistant” if your official title was “Undergraduate Student Research Assistant 1.” The goal is to reduce confusion, not introduce it.

Under each job, include a few bullet points highlighting your accomplishments in the role. This is the real substance of your resume, and it’s often the most challenging part to get right! When writing your bullet points, push yourself to convey what you actually did and achieved, not just your job description or responsibilities. Career guru Alison Green writes:

If you’re having trouble thinking of your job in terms of accomplishments, imagine a really terrible temp filling in for you — or even imagine if you were checked out at work and not trying to do well. What would go differently? What would fall to pieces? The gap between that scenario and your (hopefully excellent) performance is what you want to capture on your resume.

Here are some more tips for writing effective resume bullet points:

• Keep bullet points in the past tense and avoid using personal pronouns like “I” or “we” when describing your accomplishments — just get straight to the verb.
• Many resume experts will stress the importance of using strong action verbs (words like “overhauled,” “accelerated,” and “executed”) when composing your bullet points; personally, I don’t care what verbs you use as long as your contributions and impact are clear.
• I recommend against starting bullet points with words and phrases like “responsible for,” “helped,” “tried to,” or “learned” because the information that follows is unlikely to say much about your actual achievements.
• Some people find it useful to follow a structure such as Google’s XYZ formula (accomplished X, as measured by Y, by doing Z) or the STAR method (situation, task, action, result) when writing bullet points. If these structures help you, that’s great! But there’s no need to force every bullet point on your resume to conform to a specific formula.
• If you’re applying for a specific job, read the position description carefully, identify which of your experiences and skills are most relevant to the role, and include keywords and language from the job posting in your bullet points. For example, if the job description emphasizes data analysis and this is something you’ve done before, include words like “analyzed” and “data” in your bullet points so that the recruiter or hiring manager can easily understand how your experience translates to the role they are hiring for.
• Jobs you held for a longer time or that are more relevant to the jobs you are seeking will typically have more bullet points (three or four is a good number to aim for) on your resume while shorter involvements that are less relevant to your career, like a three-month summer lifeguard job, might just have one or two.

As a college student or new grad, it’s often a good idea to include other relevant experiences you’ve had in college that aren’t jobs or internships, such as course projects and extracurricular leadership positions. This can be a great way to highlight your professional skills when you have limited relevant work experience. If you choose to include non-work experiences on your resume, you’ll want to use appropriate headings (e.g., “Project Experience”) to call them out. Include bullet points detailing your accomplishments just as you did for your jobs and internships.

4. Skills

Unlike your contact information, education, and experience, which are essential to include on all resumes, this section will be more relevant for some people (and jobs) than others, so don’t feel like you are required to have a separate skills section on your resume if you’re not sure what to include.

The skills section of your resume should include specific skills — things like technologies, techniques, methodologies, and languages — that are (a) relevant to the job you’re applying for and (b) not so basic that nearly every college-educated person has them (e.g., proficiency in Microsoft Word). Group your skills into appropriate subheadings (e.g., Research Methods, Software, Languages) and list the individual skills either in descending order of proficiency (starting with the skills you’re best at) or in alphabetical order. This is a great place to include keywords that are listed in the job description, but make sure you’re only including skills that you’re actually prepared to use on the job. If you’re applying to highly technical roles, such as software engineering, consider moving your skills section above the experience section (but below your education) so the recruiter or hiring manager can easily identify your technical competencies.

Don’t bother listing so-called soft skills such as teamwork, customer service, communication, and problem solving. These skills are absolutely valuable on the job — often more so than “hard” skills — but you should demonstrate them using the bullet points in your experience section rather than listing them under the skills heading. (It’s a good idea to incorporate your hard skills into your experience bullet points, too!)

5. Optional sections

Depending on your particular circumstances, the kinds of jobs you’re applying for, and how much space you have left on your resume, you may consider adding one or more of these optional sections:

• Summary. This is a concise statement about your professional achievements and interests, typically placed near the top of the resume. Including a professional summary can be particularly useful for candidates whose education and experience aren’t as obviously related to the jobs they’re applying for, but you can also include this information in a cover letter.
• Certifications. If you hold any certifications that are relevant to the job you’re applying for, list them after the experience section. Include the organization that issued the certification and the date (month and year or just year) you obtained it. Skip any irrelevant certifications — no need to mention your CPR certification if you’re applying to tech jobs.
• Honors and Awards. Fellowships, grants, accolades, and prizes you have been awarded in college could be listed in their own section (rather than under the education heading) if you’ve received a lot of them or if you’re entering a field that particularly values academic achievement.
• Publications and Presentations. List any publications or conference presentations as you would on a bibliography or works cited page, including the title of the work, date, conference or publication name, and the names of any coauthors. Again, this will carry more weight in some fields than others, so use your judgment about whether it makes sense to include these details on your resume.
• Interests and Hobbies. Some people chose to include work-appropriate personal interests, extracurricular activities, and volunteer roles on their resume. I personally find this endearing (most of the time) and it can help to humanize you as a candidate, but this should be the first thing to go if you are short on space.

General principles and advice

Keep formatting simple and consistent. Use a standard font and ensure that the text is large enough to be legible both on a computer screen and when printed out on letter size paper. Margins should be at least 0.5" on all sides.

When submitting your resume to a company via an online application portal or sending it as an email attachment, make sure to save your resume with a good file name! Always include your name (first and last — or just last if you have a unique last name) and consider including the position title or requisition number in the name of the file. This will help recruiters and hiring managers find your resume easily. Use a dash (-) or underscore (_) to separate words but avoid other punctuation and spaces in the file name.

Stick to one page. I’ve seen excellent two-page resumes before, but as a current student or recent grad with limited professional experience, there are very few good reasons for your resume to spill onto a second page. One exception is if you are applying to graduate school or research roles in academia, where longer resumes or CVs are the norm.

If your resume is vague and unfocused, you are asking the recruiter or hiring manager to read between the lines and try to figure out what you bring to the table as a candidate. You’re the expert on your own life, so you are the one that needs to do the work to reflect on your experiences, craft a concise and compelling narrative about why you’re a great fit for the job, and communicate it effectively.

Solicit feedback on your resume, prioritizing input from experts. Advice from friends and family can be great, but they may not be familiar with professional norms in the field that you’re entering.

If you’re applying to a range of positions requiring different skills, you may find it useful to maintain a long “proto-resume” or “master” document that lists all of your experiences and skills (don’t send this one to employers!) and several shorter, more focused versions of your resume that are geared towards particular generic job titles (e.g., project manager, research assistant, software engineer). When applying to a specific position, read the job description and qualifications carefully, then tailor the details and keywords on your focused resume even further to reflect the posting.

Don’t list any skills or experiences on your resume that you’re not prepared to discuss in detail. If you make it to the interview stage, your interviewer will probably be looking over your resume and using it to decide what questions to ask you, so don’t put something on there that you don’t want to talk about.

Never lie or exaggerate. Frankly, it’s pretty easy to tell when someone is misrepresenting themselves, and most recruiters and hiring managers will steer clear if they suspect you are not being honest about your skills and qualifications. Even if you do manage to land a job using a dishonest resume, it’s not likely to go well. Applying for jobs isn’t about convincing an employer to hire you at any cost — it’s about finding the right fit, both for the company and for you.

More resume guidance

Looking for more resume advice and examples? Here are some recommended resources.

• The resumes category on Alison Green’s Ask a Manager blog (and check out the new grads category for more great career advice)
• The r/resumes subreddit
• Indeed’s resume samples and examples, which are “based on the most contacted Indeed Resumes for that specific job title”
• Your school’s career resource center may have a resume guide (such as this one from the University of Michigan School of Information) or offer personalized resume consultations for current students and new grads
• I haven’t used them personally, but new AI-powered tools such as Resume Worded can help you optimize your resume to align with a job description. Before paying for anything, check if your college offers free access.