Start with education and one real project
Lead with your degree, institution, and expected graduation month and year — that last detail decides eligibility for many programs and reviewers look for it immediately. Then choose relevant coursework or, better, one substantial project you can discuss in depth. For a team project, say plainly what you did rather than what the group produced. Include a link only if the work is genuinely shareable, loads without a login, and explains itself to someone arriving cold; a broken or empty link is worse than none.
Write bullets around an action and a result
Replace worked on a data project with what you actually did and what it showed. For example: cleaned a course dataset of 4,000 records, compared two forecasting approaches, and documented their error on a held-out sample. That is an illustrative sentence, not something to claim unless it describes your real work. Start each bullet with a verb, keep it to one or two lines, and include a number only where you genuinely measured something — an invented percentage is the easiest thing in the world to probe in an interview.
Use jobs and campus activities honestly
Customer service, tutoring, scheduling, event organization, and running a club budget all demonstrate reliability, communication, and ownership, and reviewers know how to read them. Name the role accurately, give its real scope, and describe outcomes you can defend. A shift lead who handled a rota for twelve people has something concrete to say. What does not work is inflating the title, implying you ran something you helped with, or describing a class exercise as professional employment.
Make it easy to read and easy to verify
Use clear section headings, consistent dates, and a restrained single-column layout — decorative templates frequently lose text when a portal parses them. Follow the employer's file instructions exactly. Proofread the exported document rather than the editor view, and check dates, spelling, links, and your own contact details; a wrong email address quietly ends an application. Leave out anything sensitive that was not asked for, including government identification numbers, your full address, a photograph, and your date of birth.
Tailor by selecting, not by inventing
For each application, move the most relevant evidence higher and cut what distracts from it. Read the posting for the specific skills it names and make sure the matching evidence is visible in the top half of the page. If you do not have something the role requires, do not claim it — a small project you can explain properly is far more persuasive than a list of tools you cannot discuss for sixty seconds. Ask a career adviser or someone in the field to read it before you submit.
Remember what a resume is for
It is not a complete record of everything you have done; it is an argument that you are worth a conversation. One page is right for almost every undergraduate applicant. If something does not support that argument for this particular role, it can come out — and it can go back in for a different application. Keep a longer private master document with everything, and cut each submitted version down from it rather than rebuilding from scratch every time.
Check eligibility and the selected role's document instructions before submitting. FirstInternships does not accept applications or store your resume.
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