An internship offers college students a unique opportunity to learn in a professional corporate environment. Landing an internship exposes you to roles and responsibilities that can build your goal-specific skills. Whether your position focuses on people, projects, or technology, an internship can prepare you for your future career goals.
That said, getting your first internship with limited to no experience is the first step. This post will give you insight into how you can create a student resume for internships.
Resume for Internships
As a student, you might not have work experience to speak of yet. Therefore, a student resume for internships focuses primarily on your education, strengths, and interpersonal skills. Creating a student resume can be challenging, and you might struggle to include enough information this early in your education. However, you can use this opportunity to showcase your strengths and personality traits that make you unique.
Remember, companies offering internships are well aware that students may or may not have any work experience at all. Therefore, you can include unique experiences or volunteer work that helped you develop specific skills necessary for the internship you wish to apply for. There are various resume examples for students that can help you get started.
To begin writing a resume for an internship, you can add the following to any work experience you may have:
- Your education
- Extracurricular activities
- Volunteer experience
- Exceptional skills
- Any achievements
Once you have gathered all of the above-mentioned information, it is time to create your resume for internships.
Steps to Create a Student Resume for an Internship
The following steps will help you write an impressive student resume for internships in an industry of your interest.
Step#1 – Consulting with the Resources
The format of resumes varies by industry. For instance, a graphic designer will have a very different resume from a data scientist. To tailor your resume, you must seek advice from your professors, career counselors, family, and friends to help create a draft. You can ask people in your network if they have any connections in the industry you wish to work for. Various counseling services for student internships can help you create a resume and explore available opportunities.
Step #2 – Writing Your Objective Statement
When writing your objective statement, you must consider employers’ needs. The best way is to go through internship descriptions from different employers and take notes on which of those skills and strengths you possess.
Do not forget to add key terms, skills, and phrases that highlight your skills ideal for the internship you are applying for. You must also include your career goals and how this internship is going to help. Another important word of advice here is to customize your objective statement for each internship application. This is a great way to highlight your skills for each company’s requirements and ensure that you take some time to personalize your materials.
Step #3 – Highlighting Your Strongest Suits and Work Experience
Always remember to mention your best qualifications and skills as a student or recent graduate. Even when you do not have work experience directly related to the internship you are applying for, mention it in a strategic manner.
For instance, if you have worked in a retail store, it demonstrates that you possess a strong work ethic, can work in a fast-paced environment, have sales skills, and can work as a team player. Each of these skills are desirable!
On the other hand, if you have no work experience but have volunteered for an organization, mention it as one of your strongest selling points. This will help show that you have some exposure to working in a professional setup.
If you wish to know how your resume measure up compared to other students at your education level, you can get a holistic analysis of your skills through Empowerly Score. This score evaluates your academics, written essays, and extracurricular activities and gives you a score highlighting the strengths that set you apart from other applications.
Step #4 – Adding Your Extracurricular Activities
Adding extracurricular activities and involvement in students’ clubs and societies is a good idea. For instance, managing your college’s social media page, writing blogs, etc., can help show your strong writing, editing, attention to detail, and tech-savvy skills. Like with other experiences, be sure to talk about what you’ve learned and the skills you’ve acquired.
Step #5 – Creating a Clean Resume for an Internship
Remember, companies offering internship opportunities are not expecting you to have a lot of experience. Therefore, you do not need to write a full-scale resume. Creating a one-page, clean, straightforward resume with your extracurricular activities and achievements will do just fine.
Make sure to write a resume in a clean format, especially when submitting it online. That means proofreading and double-checking your punctuation. Many employers run incoming resumes through an application tracking system (ATS) to automatically screen-out resumes that do not meet the company’s minimum criteria. Creating a complicated resume may result in the ATS finding it unsuitable.
It would be a great idea to search for a service provider partnering with different employers in various sectors to increase your chances of bagging an internship.
The Takeaway
Whether you are a student trying to create a resume for an internship or applying for college admission, knowing your strongest assets can help you highlight your unique skills. Empowerly can help you assess your preparedness via a simple quiz.
The Empowerly Quiz is a shortened version of the full-length Empowerly Score with fewer inputs and gives a broad result on college preparedness. The Empowerly Score is only available to students in the Empowerly Portal — it’s a separate form that assesses your overall college application profile and offers detailed recommendations for improvement.Once you have the score, you will be able to customize your resume and focus on your best selling points. Consult Empowerly today!
Madeleine Karydes
Gelyna Price