How to Really Write an Impressive Internship Resume

The idea of a single piece of paper deciding whether or not you get hired is terrifying. How can you summarize everything you’ve done on one page? Are your achievements notable enough to fill it up? What do you even fill it up with?

As a company built by students, we’ve decided to put together a life-saving guide to make writing your resume super easy.

Table of Contents

Where should I begin?

It’s very tempting to download an editable template online and just start filling it in. RESIST THAT TEMPTATION. WE REPEAT, RESIST. Going in blind and hoping for the best because the template you downloaded looks good is an ineffective strategy.

Instead, start the process with data collection. Here is what you should do:

1. Open a blank Word or Google document
2. Write down your identifying information. This includes:
   • Your full name
   • Your phone number
   • Your email
   • Your LinkedIn profile link

If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, we recommend getting one. It’s a great way to expand on your short resume and recruiters like it. Click here to learn how to create your account.

3. Next, write down your education details. This includes: 
   • Your school
   • Your major
   • Your start and expected graduation month
   • Your GPA
   • Important courses you’ve taken

4. Now comes a recruiter's favorite section. Your experiences. Start listing down all your experiences that fall under these categories: 
   • Volunteering
   • Part-time jobs
   • Student organization work
   • Projects

Include the name of the related organization/project/company, the months and years you worked with them, and what kind of work you did. Remember that you’re still in the data-collection phase of this process. Your sentences do not have to be perfect right now, they just have to be accurate. 

5. Organize the experiences in a reverse chronological format. Your most recent experiences first, and your oldest experiences later.

6. Go over your education and experience to pick out some skills you have. Remember to include tangible skills (a.k.a hard skills) such as Microsoft Office, Google Sheets, HTML, and interpersonal skills (a.k.a soft skills) such as public speaking, creativity, etc.

Just like that, you have your resource document. Call it your master resume or your resume foundation or even Bob. You now have exactly what you need to create the perfect resume for each internship you apply to.

How do I make my resume impressive?

There are many resume templates online that help you put it all together. Some good free versions can be easily found online.

When choosing your template, make sure to keep these in mind:

1. It should have simple graphics. Strong colors and visual elements can look great but they can also be distracting.
2. It should have a readable font/text. Pick fonts that are known to be readable and strong for resumes such as Arial, Georgia, and Helvetica.
3. It should help make your information scannable a.k.a important information should stick out immediately. Too many bolded words for example can make resumes look busy and difficult to scan.
4. It should be one page long. A 2018 study found that recruiters spend a grand total of 7.4 seconds scanning your resume. Seriously. Keeping it short and simple is no longer optional… It's necessary!

Once you pick your template, follow these steps:

1. Open up the internship description, your resume template, and your resource doc.
2. Add your personal information, Make your email 'clickable' by highlighting it, pressing CTROL+K, and adding your email on the bar. If you're listing a website and your LinkedIn, do the same for them as well.
3. Add your educational background. If you’ve taken coursework that matches the internship, list them here too.
4. Leave 3 lines at the top empty for your objective statement. We’ll come back to this later.
5. Read through the internship description and highlight the requirements you meet on your resource doc. For example: Let’s say your internship requires you to have strong event planning skills. You work as an event coordinator at your organization. Badabing badaboom: that’s a skill match! Highlight that.
6. Add relevant experiences to your resume. In your bullet descriptions under each experience, highlight what you did. If you did many things, stick to listing things that are most relevant to the internship you're applying to.
   • Start with a strong action verb. Harvard School lists out these powerful action verbs.
   • Then say what you did and be as specific as possible.
   • Don’t end the sentence there! State how you did it.
   • Bonus points if you mention the impact of your work.
   • Example of a poor responsibility bullet: I planned all of my sorority’s social events.
   • Example of an improved statement: Managed planning and execution of all 2022 Alpha Phi events resulting in a 43% increase in turnout compared to 2021.

6. Finally, it’s good to have a section where you list out your skills. You want to refer to the internship requirements and pick out keywords that match, but you also want to make sure you’re being honest. 
7. Last but not the least, it is time you write your objective statement. This part goes at the top of your resume, but we asked you to not write it until now.
   • Why? Because once you have your personal info, education, experiences, and skills down and you’ve basically memorized what the internship requirements are, it becomes so much easier to write this part. 
   • Your objective statement should be a short summary of your resume that contains a description of you, your key skills, and what you’re looking for.
   • For example; A driven and creative business major with strong communication, organization, sales, and marketing skills looking for an internship at XYZ.

What to avoid when writing a resume?

1. Lying. If you only went to an introductory seminar on a program, you cannot list the subject as your skill. Focus on the skills you do have. If you're lacking skills, emphasize your confidence in picking up the skills on the job.
2. Being generic. Your responsibility descriptions must be specific and filled with information. 
3. Keyword stuffing. Don’t try to add all the skills you find on the job requirements into your resume. Most recruiters can sniff BS from miles away.
4. Not customizing the resume to the position. Use your master resume to refer to each time you have to personalize the resume to the position you apply to. It’s less draining and just as effective when all your work is listed roughly somewhere and you just have to copy-paste and tweak.
5. Making grammatical errors. Believe the squiggly lines under words, fix them before you submit!
6. Using big words to sound smart. You should try to keep it as simple and straightforward as you can.
7. Adding references where you say they can ask you for references. If they need them they’ll mention it! Don’t waste space by saying ‘References are available upon request’.

My resume is ready, now what?

You’re almost there! Here are a few tips once your resume is ready for an even more impressive submission:

1. Proofread your resume carefully. Read your resume from start to finish. Then, go water your flowers, read a book, or aimlessly scroll through TikTok like me and come back to read it again. Correct any errors you find! When you're staring at something for too long it gets harder to correct, so coming back to it later can give you a good perspective.
2. Convert your resume into a pdf. It will lock your format in nicely and neatly.
3. Change your resume’s name to a relevant name. This could be your name and the internship position title. For example: Andrea Dayo_Engineering Intern.
4. See if your application requires a cover letter. Here's an easy guide to write one if you need it.
5. Keep your master resume updated. Add anything and everything you do there. When you rebuild your resume in the future, it’ll come in handy.

Key Takeaways

1. Write down all the facts that you’ll need to put in your resume first. This includes your personal, educational, and experiential information.
2. Work with the internship requirements to build the resume you’ll submit.
3. Use an easy-to-read and scannable template.
4. Write powerful responsibility descriptions using the action verb + what + how + impact formula.
5. List relevant skills.
6. Write a strong objective statement that summarizes your key traits, skills, and goals.