When you apply for an internship position, you only have six seconds to catch the hiring manager’s attention; otherwise, your application will join the “Rejected” pile. For this reason, your goal should be to create a document that showcases your main accomplishments but also stands out among the sea of similar college students’ applications.
Today we share trade secrets that HR managers don’t want you to know, or they would soon be swamped with great resumes. Read, apply, and win!
How to Write a Resume for an Internship
If you’ve ended up here, you must have already seen a few dozen resume samples. However, standard templates will be of no help when you need a resume for an internship. With little to no work experience and no degree, you are left with a half-empty page missing a few key sections. Do not fret, transforming this disaster into a winning internship resume takes only a couple of hours of intense work, if you know what you are doing and follow our advice.
Tighten up Your Career Objective
Six seconds are just enough time for a hiring manager to skim the professional summary you put at the top of the page. Think of this section as a movie teaser or an elevator pitch. It serves as a brief, tantalizing preview of the bigger picture.
A career objective should be short and on point. Do not describe what you want to achieve during an internship, instead, focus on what you bring to the table, how you can benefit the company, what qualities make you the best candidate. Once you write a long passage about this, halve it, then repeat the process until your career summary fits into two or three short sentences. They should become a distilled sales pitch highlighting your skills, character traits, and abilities that meet the internship requirements.
Expand Your Education Section
Even if you possess relevant work experience, it will probably not be enough to fill one of the most extensive sections. Therefore, writing a resume for an internship relies heavily on your academic prowess. You should include:
- Your GPA if it is 3.0 or above. It proves your ability to work under pressure and produce high-quality results worthy of high grades.
- Classes relevant to the position description. A list of courses will show the HR manager the scope of your knowledge and interests.
- Extracurriculars that demonstrate the skills required by the internship position. For examples, being a team captain is proof of leadership skills while editing a college newspaper shows your creativity and editing experience.
Pad Your Significant Achievements Section
Many students don’t know how to write a resume for an internship to fill the whole page without the work history section. You can simply list your significant accomplishments relevant to the position you seek.
Format this part the way you would treat the work experience part:
- Put the name of the project or achievement at the top;
- Include dates if the project took a few months or years;
- Add a bullet list of your measurable results, each starting with an action verb.
These points could include the research paper that was published in a scientific journal, a previous internship, your position as a college radio host, or the head of the drama club. Academic awards and honors will also benefit this section. List all of your achievements in a separate file, then pick and choose relevant experiences for individual internships. This neat trick will save your time if you plan on sending five or more internship applications.
Bonus Trick: Follow the Instructions
When your college professors get nitpicky and scold you for the smallest formatting mistakes, they prepare you for the hardest lesson you will learn in adult life. No one cares how right you are for a position, or how great your application is if it does not meet the requirements. In school, a small mistake will lower your grade, but in an internship hunt, it will instantly get your eliminated from the competition.
Hiring managers, especially in large companies, rely on sophisticated software to sort through incoming emails and applications. If you misspell the email subject line or do not attach the resume in the required format, HR personnel won’t even receive your application. It will be automatically sorted as irrelevant.
Pay attention to internship application rules and requirements and follow them to a T.
Do You Need Professional Resume Writer Your Resume for an Internship?
For a college student, resume for an internship might seem complicated and not worth the effort. When you consider our tips and realize your application needs a lot of work to gain the recruiters’ attention, you can feel even more discouraged. Don’t give up so quickly!
If you don’t know where to start, reach out to our professional writers. They can clean up your existing resume or create one from scratch to fit the requirements of a specific position. They will take your notes on academic records and past achievement and translate them into HR-speak, impossible for hiring managers to resist. Order your resume today and enjoy a successful internship hunt!Suggested Reading:
- A Free Customer Service Resume Template And How To Use It
- Job Winning Skills For Resume