Resumes

After reviewing many student resumes and repeating the same suggestions, these are compiled general tips on how to write resumes! Also just as a note and background, I’m a software engineer who has worked and am working at big tech companies. I’m not a recruiter.

If you’re reading this article, chances are you were sent here to update your resume before sending it to me to review. Please read carefully and update accordingly, or for parts you don’t want to follow, write that in the email you’re sending to me with your resume. I will send you back to this article if I see parts that either weren’t noted in the email or you did not follow.

And now with that out of the way, let’s get into it!

First off, recruiters, who are people looking for suitable candidates to interview, often look at a resume for about thirty seconds to a minute. They do not have time to read every single word, so make everything concise but understandable. Delete filler words (ie “I’m starting university this year with a degree in Computer Science” has way too many unnecessary words, just write “B.S. Computer Science”), and use phrases and bullet points, not full sentences.

Your resume will eventually get passed on to technical managers or potential team members as well, so make sure it’s clear and explains your accomplishments (particularly job/internship and projects) well on one page. ONE PAGE, ONE COLUMN only! Scrap two-column resumes and only use one column, as two columns are hard to read, wastes a lot of space which very quickly becomes precious on resumes, and doesn’t streamline the order of which the reader processes the information.

A resume should only contain what you have done and what you’re currently doing; do not include futuristic items.

As a caveat, this resume is tailored for getting software engineering opportunities in the USA. I don’t know much about how resumes in other countries are, and I know some countries ask for CV’s which are different than resumes.

Ordering

So let’s get started. I’ll go over the different sections your resume should have as well as the order they should be in, starting from top to bottom. The sections and order of sections in your resume should be: name and self-identifying information, education, experience, projects, skills, extracurriculars, and awards, in that order and with those names (aside from “name and self-identifying information”). This is the order of importance. As you’re still in school, that’s the most important. Then work experience (internships, research, TA’ing), technical skills (programming languages and technologies), projects (from hackathons, outside of school, or courses), and extracurriculars (clubs, organizations, volunteering).

Always follow the above order unless you have a VERY good reason not to. Some exceptions are: if you have 2+ CS internships or are not a CS major, then you can put education after your projects section. If you have 2+ CS internships, then you can do: Work Experience -> Skills -> Education -> Projects -> Extracurriculars.

Note that there is not a section for “About Me” or “Summary” or anything like that. Do not include one, because it’s too many words and nobody will have time to read it. If your resume is written well, the resume viewer should be able to get the same information more quickly than reading a section about it, and such a section will contain repeated information, which takes up precious resume space.

Of course, if you don’t have anything to show for a particular section or sections, then don’t include it on your resume. We all start from all sections having nothing, and we build them up eventually!

Aside from ordering the sections on your resume, there’s also ordering within each section. Always order from most recent to least recent by end date (date meaning month and year, not the specific day), and if you have entries that end on the same date, then order most recent to least recent by starting date.

A note on dates: I like using three-letter abbreviations (ie Dec for December, Feb for February, etc) because this takes up less space and gets the same point across. Also, if the starting and ending year of an item is the same, you don’t need to write the year twice. For example, if you started an internship in Jun 2020 and it ended in Aug 2020, you can just write “Jun - Aug 2020” instead of “Jun 2020 - Aug 2020”.

Self-Identifying Information

The top of your resume should be your name, as well as self-identifying information. This is a good order for that information, and I’d recommend putting it all in one line since doing so saves space:

(Personal Website | LinkedIn | Github | other sites) | Email | Phone | City, State/Province

Email will be used first, so that’s why it’s first. Separately, a lot of people put their entire address, but that’s really not needed — recruiters / hiring managers basically only need city, state/province to know whether you’ll need to relocate for work. Include country if you’re not from the USA or Canada.

For any links, linkify it (ie have the word “LinkedIn”, and “add hyperlink” to it so it becomes clickable). You don’t need to write out the entire URL unless you’re printing resumes to hand out, as most people will access your resume on a laptop / computer and will want to click on any links.

Education

Write your school name and expected graduation date with the month and year. Many like writing the starting year/date, but it’s crucial to have your graduation year and the starting date is not needed. Recruiters need to know when you’re graduating so they know whether you’re looking for an internship or full-time role. “Expected graduation:” with the month and year is recommended. Make sure you include the word “Expected” if you haven’t graduated yet, because you don’t know how the future will play out; maybe you’ll graduate earlier than you think, or maybe you’ll graduate later than expected.

Write out your degree along with any concentrations or minors, and leave off any words like “candidate for” or “intended degree” — since the date lets the reader know you’re currently in college and working towards getting that degree, reiterating that is redundant. Just write “Bachelor of [degree]: [major]”.

You can include your GPA if it’s high as well as the scale it’s out of, ie 3.7 / 4.0; don’t just write 3.7, because not everyone operates under a 4.0 scale. If your resume is not great (in my opinion, under a 3.5), just leave it off because most of the time, your GPA doesn’t matter. If it does matter, companies will ask. Feel free to include any university-related awards here as well.

Most importantly, list out relevant courses that you’ve take. Just say “Courses” and list them out. Many students like saying “Relevant Courses”, but whoever’s reading your resume know that the classes you list are the relevant ones and not every class you’ve ever taken. Writing the word “relevant” there is unnecessary.

In listing out the courses, preferably list from most advanced classes to introductory. If classes are about the same in how advanced they are (ie in my opinion, all upper division classes are quite advanced), put ones you enjoyed the most first, especially if you’re trying to get a position in that space. However, only include the course name, not the numbers, because nobody will understand what those numbers are unless they went to specifically your university and did your major. Also, list the actual course names, do not end up listing programming languages.

Here is an example of an education section:

Work Experience

You can name this section “Experience” if you’ve participated in computer science (or STEM fields) learning programs or “Work Experience” otherwise. Do not use the word “Relevant” anywhere in that — again, just like for listing courses, resume readers know you’re listing relevant (work) experience and not everything you’ve ever done.

This will become the most important section of your resume once you get a few internships and then eventually a full-time job.

List the company or organization first in bold then your position there — if you were an intern, make sure you include that in your title. Following that on the same line, put in parenthesis the technologies you used. Including the technologies at the top of each experience section makes clear what you used in the role and prevents needing to repeat the tech multiple times throughout that particular experience. On the right side of the line, write the location followed with a pipe | and the starting and ending month / year. All of this information just mentioned here in this paragraph should be on one line — it saves space. See below for an example.

Under each position title, bullet point the main projects you did during your time there. Each bullet point should contain ideally what you accomplished and the outcome and why what you did was important (in other words, your impact backed by metrics and data).

To start off a bullet point, start with a verb highlighting what you accomplished. Do not start with the tech you used because you have already the tech in your skills section and at the top of each experience; I would also recommend not bolding it as many resumes do for the same reason. This is a chance for you to tell someone what you did what the tech you know; what you were able to build is far more important than the tech stack.

Keep in mind that while hiring managers and your potential coworkers are technical so they’ll understand jargon, you really want to get across what exactly you did. Saying you built a website is not enough; what did the website do? Building a static website to display information is vastly different from building Google Search or Facebook, all of which are websites.

Write out abbreviations and do not write the actual abbreviation unless you’re using the abbreviation elsewhere in your resume. For example, if I wanted to say “roll on floor laughing”, I would write that out and not put “roll on floor laughing (ROFL)” unless I needed to use ROFL elsewhere in my resume. There’s no point of writing the abbreviation unless it’s going to be used again, as it’s unnecessarily going to take up space; the reader doesn’t need to know what the abbreviation is to understand the rest of the resume.

Lastly, it’s great to have some metrics on the outcome to show your impact — why was doing what did important? You probably added some feature, but other than “we have this feature now”, why was having that feature or improvement important? Metrics are understandably difficult to get and they’re not instant, as seeing app growth or a rise in revenue will probably come after you leave an internship, but it’s still great if you’re aware and add metrics where you can. For example, if you’ve decreased latency for a project by half, that’s great! Or, if you helped build a launched new feature and there’s 1000 daily active users hitting that feature per day, say that!

As a side note, try to keep your bullet points to one line, at most two. Eliminate “the”, “a”, and other filler words as well as shorten phrases like “more than 30 participants” to “30+ participants”. Space is precious on resumes!

I’ll now go over an example of a bullet point in a particular experience.

I can say: Built a website.

Immediate question: what did the website do?

Better (because I say what the website does): Built website displaying visualizations of exercise metrics such as number of steps, heart rate, and sleep cycles.

Including some metrics will allow this bullet point to going above and beyond.

Best: Built dashboard displaying visualizations of exercise metrics such as number of steps, heart rate, and sleep cycles, raising revenue by 5%.

This is a fake example, and I’ve never done that, but if I did, this phrase is concise, tells exactly what I did, using what, and how it’s impactful. If you decide to put the technologies next to your position, you can even delete that part.

As a final exercise, try to make your bullet point fit on one line. Conciseness and clarity really matters here, and try to read what you wrote as if you didn’t have any context on it. Do you understand what you did at that job? Is it too vague? Too specific?

Here is an example of an experience section:

Projects

The projects section is going to look quite similar to your experience section. Write the name of the project and provide a github link if possible, and put the technologies you used on the same line so as to make clear what you used and to prevent repeating them in your bullet points. The bullet points should look similar to the experience section ones, and your impact can include metrics like “1000 Android downloads” if you put it on the Play or App Store.

There’s not much more to say regarding this, but again, the high quality of bullet points is crucial for describing achievements and implemented functionalities.

Here is an example of a projects section:

Technical Skills

Many people have asked why technical skills go beneath all of the above and not as the first item. Recruiters will probably care most about what technical skills you have, but at a very shallow level. Hiring managers and potential teammates, who are ultimately deciding whether you’re joining their team and therefore should be your audience when you write your resume, will care about what you’ve actually done. What technical skills you have becomes way less important than the work you’ve accomplished using those skills.

To illustrate my point, if you list ten items in skills but your experience / projects show that you’ve mostly used one of those, then the list doesn’t matter. Vice versa, if you’ve extensively used one skill in your experience / projects and a hiring team is looking for an individual with a similar skill but not the exact skill you have, then you lacking that skill doesn’t matter because they know you have extensively used and are well-versed in a similar skill. A list will not tell them that.

Under technical skills, break these down into two lists: languages and technologies. Just list them — you don’t need to say “proficient”, “beginner”, etc, nor the number of years you’ve used them. It’s not necessary to tell people you’re a beginner and it’s subjective, and the number of years is never really too accurate. If you’ve used it before, you’ll be able to figure out how to use it again (and become more advanced if needed).

Make each list in the order of proficiency. For libraries of certain languages, include it in the language list. For example, if you’ve used pandas or NumPy for Python, list it as “Python (pandas, NumPy)”. Don’t put individual libraries in their own list. For technologies, they can be frameworks like Angular, React, Vue, Flask, Django, Ruby on Rails; they can be databases like MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL; they can be SDKs, APIs, or cloud services like Flutter, Google Places API, Firebase, AWS; they can be tools like Github.

Do not put Microsoft Office in any of these lists; you’re expected to know how to use those products and learn if you don’t. They are irrelevant to software engineering. Also do not put spoken languages in this section. It’s technical skills, not all the skills you have. If you want to list spoken languages, put them in your extracurriculars section — the extracurriculars section is the only section that should contain content that isn’t strictly related to the job you’re applying for.

Do not put soft skills. Soft skills go in the cover letter if the job application requires one, otherwise they will be assessed during the interview. Resumes should contain facts, not subjective information (soft skills are subjective).

Here is an example of a technical skills section:

Awards, Honors, Certifications

For any coding-related awards, honors, and certifications, have a section for them. If you have a lot of awards or honors, each of them can be its own section, but if you just have one or two in total, put them all together. If you have non coding-related ones, put them as an entry in the extracurricular activity section. You can put any university-related ones under the “Education” section.

Write down the organization name, but also the word “hackathon”, “coding competition”, etc for names that people may not be aware of. For example, if you write down a hackathon name that doesn’t have the word “hackathon” in it, readers may not know that it’s a hackathon. Same with coding competitions, and for whatever other awards you’ve received.

Include the place you got (if applicable) and out of how many people participated. For example, if you won first place at a hackathon out of 1000 project submissions, you should write that. If you were in the top 10% for a coding competition, say so. If you received an industry-level certification, you can just write that and not say which place you got (because that wouldn’t apply here).

Just as a side note, participation certifications are not what I’m talking about when I say certification. There are certifications (exams) for certain areas of software engineering and other professions.

Each entry in this section should be one line.

If you’ve received an award for a listed project and your entire award/honor/certification section has only one or two pieces of content including the award for the listed project, put your award with your project in the project section. Otherwise, still mention your app briefly in the award section (and make sure you include the project in your projects section), ie “Won prize for best hack out of 1000 submissions for app that detects plagiarism”.

Here is an example of an awards / honors / certifications section:

Extracurricular Activities

This section will cover student organizations involvement, leadership positions, any volunteer work that you do, and any hobbies you have where you’ve accomplished a concrete goal.

Student organization participation counts, and leadership is great. If you’re in a coding club and you tutor other students, great! If you’re in a business fraternity, include it! If you’re the president of the student body, write that down! Any involvement with student life is great, and it’s even better if you’re actively driving the organization in some way.

Volunteer work can go here too. Many students don’t have time for this or it’s tied to a student organization, but if you’re out of university or are volunteering in a non-profit, definitely note that down.

Some students like having a line of interests and hobbies. This is fluff. Scrap them unless you’ve accomplished something in them or actually have something to show for it, whether it’s how long you’ve done it, winning awards / competitions, etc. For example, playing piano since you were 5 years old and having solo performed, taught piano, and played in an ensemble can belong in the extracurricular section, as can playing volleyball for the past 10+ years on various teams. The fact that you read does not and the fact that you’re a foodie is not.

Here’s an example for the extracurricular activities section:

Visuals

Uniformity is really important. Choose one font and stick with it throughout your entire resume, and use mostly one or two font sizes within that font. Sans-serif fonts are preferred as serif fonts make resumes look really blocky and not pleasant to the eye.

Bold, underline, italicize, and all caps are good ways to emphasize, but use them wisely and sparingly. Making a change to the font will draw the reader’s attention to it, so make sure what looks different is where you want to draw the reader. Along with that, do not use bold, bright colors for words (or parts of words) that do not matter. This will cause unnecessary distractions to those words or sections, and this takes away from seeing the important parts.

Make sure your bullets, spacing, dates, etc, are all aligned, no extra spaces randomly here and there. Nobody’s going to not hire you per se because of these, but it’s still nice to have your resume look neat and tidy. Using right-align in either Google Docs or Microsoft Word is super useful, and if you don’t know what that means, look for a video about it. The ruler is super helpful too for formatting.

Use a regular font (not bolded, italicized, or anything else) for location and date, as they’re unimportant.

Resume Template

If you don’t have a resume and want to get started on one, here’s a resume template that I put together with the content I just talked about. I would suggest working off of that if you’re looking for a software engineering opportunity.

Final Words

There you have it! I know this is a lot of detailed information, but I’ve seen many resumes and everything I’ve written here is something I’ve said at least once, if not multiple times.

Once your resume is done, always convert it into a PDF and send the PDF, so the format you see is the format the receiver of your resume sees.

Writing a resume well is super important, and it’s the first step in getting you a job. Make sure you spend time on it, ask others to take a look for you, and revise, edit, and perfect it before you send it out. It’s the first impression of you to the company, so make it count and put your best foot forward!