Internship Resume

About This Resume

Whether you enjoy writing about yourself or see it as a chore, internship coordinators still rely on a resume to judge your interests, your reliability and how clearly you explain your work. The key to an internship resume, then, is to show what you've done in classes and on campus plainly and briefly but with real detail. Everyone applying is short on experience.

Many internships are open to students of any major, as employers are interested in interns from a range of programs. Landing one without related coursework might be possible, but applicants who can point to a relevant class project will have an edge over other students applying for the same spot. That project is what reviewers look for first, followed by the skills and tools it used.

What to Include

• Your school, major, expected graduation month and year, and GPA if it helps
• Three to six relevant classes by name, chosen for the internship you want
• Class or personal projects with the tools used and what came out of them
• Campus jobs and part-time work, even unrelated ones, since they show you can keep a schedule
• Clubs, teams and volunteer roles where you led, organized or taught something
• Technical skills and languages, each with an honest level such as basic, working or fluent

Internship Resume Sample

Tips for Your Internship Resume

• If you're in your first or second year, keep high school only for standout items such as a state award, and let college work take the space.
• Once you have one project written up you will need to do the same for any other class in which you built, tested or presented something. You need only include the projects that fit the internship and ended in a result you can name.
• "Group project on bus data" says little. "Cleaned two years of bus ridership records in Python and built a dashboard for a local transit agency" tells a reviewer the tools, the data and who it was for.
• Always try to send your resume directly to the person who will be supervising the intern, especially at small firms. Bear in mind that a reply is more likely if you mention a class or project that fits their work. One sentence is enough.
• A joke email address can spoil an otherwise solid internship resume, which is an easy problem to avoid, since a new address built from your name takes two minutes to set up. Better yet, after you set it up and before you apply, have someone at your campus career center look over the whole page as well.
• Finally, you will want to apply early. While many students wait until spring, it is a good idea to apply to larger companies during the fall semester, because many of them fill summer spots months ahead. This allows you to spend spring on smaller employers who hire closer to the start date.