How to Write a College Resume When You Have No Experience

What goes on a resume when you have never had a job?

Coursework, projects, campus involvement, volunteering and skills. A first resume is not a record of employment. It is evidence that you can do things, and coursework and projects are evidence. The mistake is leaving the page half empty because you are only counting paid work.

Put education first, and make it do some work

With no job history, education is your strongest section, so it goes at the top. Include your school, your degree and major, and your expected graduation date.

Add your GPA if it is 3.0 or above. Leave it off if it is not, and no, that is not dishonest. Nobody lists everything.

Then add a line for relevant coursework, naming four to six courses that relate to the job. This is the highest value line on a first resume and most students skip it. If you are applying for a data role, "Statistics, Database Systems, Research Methods" tells a reader more than a job title at a coffee shop would.

Projects count, including class projects

A class project is a project. Describe it the way you would describe work: what the goal was, what you did, and what came out of it.

One line each, three at most. "Built a survey of 200 students on campus dining and presented findings to the housing office" is a real accomplishment, and it happened in a class.

Campus involvement is experience

Club roles, intramural teams, student government, orientation leader, resident assistant, tutoring. These involve responsibility, other people and deadlines, which is what an employer is actually screening for.

Treat a club treasurer role like a job entry. It had responsibilities and outcomes, so write them.

What about part-time work that feels irrelevant?

Include it. Retail and food service demonstrate reliability, customer contact and working under pressure, and hiring managers know it. What makes it read as irrelevant is describing duties rather than results. "Trained four new staff during a summer rush" is not a coffee shop line, it is a leadership line.

How long should it be?

One page. Not one and a bit. If you are struggling to fill it, widen your definition of experience rather than widening your margins or your font.

What to leave off

• An objective statement, which almost always restates the job title back at the reader
• High school anything, once you are past your first year
• Skills nobody verifies, like "hardworking" or "team player"
• References available on request, which is assumed
• A photo, in the US market

Format so a human and a machine can both read it

Many applications pass through automated screening before anyone sees them. That means a single column, standard section headings, real text rather than text inside an image, and a PDF unless the posting asks for something else.

Design flourishes are what cause a resume to arrive as scrambled text. Plain formatting is not boring, it is legible.

Where College Life helps

The resume builder in College Life gives you the structure so you are filling in sections rather than staring at a blank document, and building, printing and sharing it are free. Exporting as a PDF is part of Premium at $4.99 a month.

The most useful thing you can do this week is start it before you need it. A resume written the night before a deadline is always the version where you forget the class project that would have got you the interview.