Write a great resume
When you're applying for an internship, a strong, attractive resume is the first step in getting recruiters and hiring managers to notice you. Whether your application gets seen or overlooked hinges on how you present your job and life experiences.
Note
Recruiters scan hundreds of resumes daily. Although they do look at every resume submitted for a role, only those that catch their eye will get their full attention. Therefore, it's important to ensure that your resume complies in both format and content to what recruiters are looking for.
What to look for in the job description
Before you begin, review the requirements of the position you're interested in, and make sure that your resume will address at least some of them. If it doesn't, it might not pass the recruiter's first scan.
As you're reviewing the description of a role, pay close attention to both the technical and human skills that are required for the job. As you tailor your resume to fit this role, be sure to provide examples that show how you exhibit both these types of skills.
Technical skills
Employers often list technical skills in two different ways:
Minimum requirements for the position: If you don't meet the minimum requirements, your application might not make it past the initial screening. However, no company expects an intern to start out as an expert. Treat these minimum qualifications as guidance toward certain skills that you should develop, and then use your resume to explain how you're already gaining experience in those areas and will likely make progress on them by the time you interview.
Note
Remember, the job you definitely won't get is the one for which you don't apply. Although it's unrealistic to apply for a job or internship without any of the required skills, consider this: if you start with a basic level in a skill and work hard on it, a lot can happen in a matter of weeks and months to set you up for success.
Technical skills that are listed as "preferred": Note these skills, and determine which ones you already have and which ones are achievable before that first interview.
Human skills
Human skills, sometimes called soft skills, are those that aren't technical in nature but are important for success as part of a team. When you're reading a description for a job, it's important to identify those soft skills and demonstrate in your resume that you possess them.
It's often difficult to make out what human skills are required according to a job description. The way to spot these skills is to look for certain keywords, such as teamwork and collaboration. Consider the following sentence from a sample job description:
"You will be responsible for driving cross-team collaboration...negotiating design solutions...and will be expected to collaborate with other interns."
Think about times when you demonstrated the above-listed skills and mention them in your resume. You might have demonstrated them in a school project or student organization.
Identifying your strengths and skills
After you've analyzed the requirements listed in the job posting, your next step is to identify how well your own strengths and skills align with these requirements. Put aside some time to do the following:
Create two lists from the requirements you gathered, one for technical skills and one for human skills.
Compare the list of required technical skills with the technical skills you already possess.
Determine where and how you acquired these skills, and list these sources. These skills could have come from classes, extracurricular clubs, boot camps, online courses, personal projects, hackathons, and more.
Determine any overlaps, such as a project where you acquired and implemented one or more of these technical skills, and then assign the skills a priority.
Be brief! Student resumes should be one page at most, so you'll need to choose your most relevant experience.
Now, in your list of human skills, identify which ones you applied during your higher-priority experiences. Make a note to include them in the descriptions you'll write.
Experience as impact
To stand out from among other applicants, you must be able to condense your experience into short yet insightful bullet points. But the descriptions must delve deeper than only into what you did. It's critical to demonstrate your impact on the project or process. Demonstrating impact really showcases your skills and paints a vivid picture of your technical and non-technical experiences.
With this knowledge in mind, let's explore how to best address your experiences and illustrate your impact.
Technical experience
Technical experience includes anything you had an impact on that can be related to technical skills. This type of experience can include, among many other examples:
- Personal or class projects
- Research positions
- Teaching assistant or tutoring positions
- Hackathon projects
Volunteer work with nonprofit organizations in and outside of school
Volunteer activities are attractive to recruiters, because they're great ways to acquire, implement, and demonstrate both technical and human skills. They also provide the basis for technical chats in interviews. Therefore, it's important to record these experiences in efficient, eye-catching ways that really highlight your impact.
To illustrate, let's create a scenario with a class project:
Suppose you worked on a Python class project that required bug fixing for a calculator to work correctly. You identified the issues, implemented the fixes, and tested them before turning in the project for grading. You might start by describing the project in this way:
Calculator Project - Programming II Class Example University 2020
- Programmed a calculator program using Python.
- Fixed bugs that were in the original code
Although this example does describe your work on the project, it sounds like a basic project, not an important one, and fails to showcase you as an individual.
By rephrasing it to focus on your impact, however, you'll demonstrate your skills and impact far more effectively. Try something like the following approach:
Calculator Class Project - Example University 2020
- Ensured the correct functionality of a calculator program by identifying X bugs, utilizing Python Exemption classes and debugging tools, implementing fixes, and testing the program through Y test cases.
This statement showcases your impact by describing for the reader how you contributed to the project and providing real data (X and Y) to measure your work. When you use this approach, you'll not only catch the attention of recruiters, but you'll also demonstrate how well you're able to communicate your impact.
An easy-to-follow impact statement template can look like this:
Achieved (or any impact-driven action verb) _____ (what you achieved) by doing ____ (how you achieved it), measured by ____ (any number that serves as context for your description. Though not always necessary, metrics help bring value to your actions).
Non-technical experience
A common misconception about technical internships is that non-technical experience has no value in a resume. Many students believe that companies care only about how good or experienced a candidate is in programming languages, software concepts, data structures, or math. However, non-technical experience provides unique ways to showcase who you are, a critical aspect to convey when you apply for a job.
Luckily, describing a non-technical experience can be similar to describing technical experiences. In fact, the previously mentioned template can be used and adapted to non-technical skills, as you can see in the following scenario:
You are a member of a gardening club, where you care for some of the plants at the club's nursery, participate in bi-weekly meetings, and provide assistance in some of the events held by the club.
By using the description template, you could write some bullet points like the following ones:
- Maintained the club's nursery by monitoring and caring for X different plant species, in collaboration with X other members.
- Managed X club activities by attending bi-weekly club meetings, communicating and discussing ideas, and scheduling number events.
- Increased event attendance by X attendees by developing the marketing campaigns of the club in collaboration with a group of X members.
These points describe your experience while highlighting your interests as an individual. You emphasize your grasp of collaboration, communication, time management, dependability, and decision-making. Do not take non-technical experience lightly, because it could often help you as much as or more than your technical experience when it comes to standing out among other applicants.
Your ongoing experiences
Whenever you describe an ongoing experience in your resume, write about it by using action verbs in present tense. For example, write "ensure" instead of "ensured," "develop" instead of "developed," and so on. Even if the task has already been completed, if the experience is ongoing, the best practice is to keep it in present tense. This approach tells recruiters that you're currently working on something. For experiences that began and ended in the past, use past tense.
Next steps
Now that you know how to describe your experiences, the next step is to build your resume.