The Ideal First Resume

Written on January 13th, 2022 by Naser

Putting together your first resume can be intimidating. In this post, I will show you how you can write an “ideal” first resume even if you think you don’t have enough experiences to fill a single page. Without ado is furthered any longer, here’s what you should include (in my opinion):

Name and Contact Information

This might seem simple, but include your full name, your preferred name in parentheses, your phone number and email address. Make sure your phone number and email address are clickable, so people could click on them to email you or call you. Sadly, no one has the time to rewrite things anymore. Also, I don’t think your physical address is too important here, so I recommend using a phrase like “Greater Boston Area” instead of an actual street address.

LinkedIn and GitHub

Not sponsored by LinkedIn, but you should have an account, and you should include a link to your account on your resume. More importantly for a techie (such as yourself), you should link your GitHub account on your resume. I will talk more about what to put on your GitHub account in another point.

Education Section

Include information about your College/University, major/minor, Class Year, and GPA. Also, on a single line, you can add a list of courses that you have completed in the major/minor relevant to the position that you are applying for. For an internship in tech, Data Structures and Algorithms is a key course that students typically seek internships after.

Experience Section

If you have any professional experiences, you can list them briefly here. Even if you think that some experiences are not relevant to jobs in tech, professional experiences in general show maturity and responsibility. You can give more emphasis to jobs and experiences that relate to tech, and if you don’t have any, no problem, this is your calling to become a TA next semester 😊

Key Projects

Select 3 to 5 impressive projects (from courses or just passion projects) to talk about briefly. Make sure your language explains the project to someone who is not familiar with it. For example, project one in Data Structures and Algorithms at Colby can be presented like this:

Implemented a Blackjack Monte Carlo Simulation in Java
to determine whether “the house always wins” under 
different playing strategies. [GitHub]

Similarly, you can add a single statement about projects that you view as interesting or exceptional.

Notice the GitHub link at the end of the statement, the most important part of this section is that you have the code of each project to showcase. This means that you will clean up your code and make sure that you have near perfect documentation before you post it on GitHub and link it on your resume. As a reminder, Python has a style guide that you can use: PEP 8 style guide.

Skills

You can list the programming languages, frameworks, and tools that you know on a single line. I find it interesting when the skills line is followed by “currently learning” list of two to three items.

Extracurricular Activities

This is a section that shows that you are an above-average student with passion for tech. You can join and include clubs like:

  1. e-NABLE at Colby: A community for 3D printing prosthetics (contact Brunda Katikireddy to join).
  2. Colby Robotics Team: a community for building robots (contact Richard Trinh and Cathy Fan to join).

Also, attend hackathons, join ACM and IEEE, volunteer for tech events near you.

Don’t overdo the graphics

Make sure that you don’t overdo the graphics and colors. A simple design is usually easy to read and more environmentally friendly to print. Generally, the following things are not needed on your resume: Photo, a lot of unrelated experiences, long list of hobbies, full address, and more than one page in length (the page limit will change in the future).

Research and graduate school resume

A student resume for a research position or graduate school is substantially different from an internship/tech job resume, here’s an excellent video that shows what a research resume looks like:

Look at that! You have a resume already, isn’t that awesome! I would be happy to give you my opinion on your resume, and it does not hurt to get feedback from mentors or advisors. I will wear sunglasses when I review your resume, because your future is so bright! 😎

Good luck!

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