33. Resume Tips for Students: How to Build a Resume That Sets You Apart
Episode 33
In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I teach you everything you need to know about building a student resume that helps you stand out from the pack and get you in the door (to college, to your internships, and to jobs).
Your resume is your first impression, and as you already know, you only have one chance at a first impression.
By the end of this episode, you’ll know:
✅ The 5 core sections your student resume needs to have
✅ How to craft the ideal objective statement (and why it matters)
✅ What not to include on your student resume
✅ How to customize your resume for your age and goals
✅ How to take a high school resume to a college resume (and ultimately, to a professional resume)
✏️ FREE DOWNLOADS:
→ Daily Timeblock Planner (pdf)
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)
33 resume tips for students
[00:00:00] Well, hello. My friends, you are listening to episode 33 of the learn and work smarter podcast. Every time I record a podcast and say what episode number it is, I am hit with a sense of "oh, my gosh. How have I done so many episodes already?" If you are new to listening, welcome. And I am so glad you're here.
If you have been listening for a while, then welcome black back. I am so glad you are here too.
Here on the podcast, my goal is to share tips and strategies about skills and systems that will make, you know, learning and working easier and more efficient and more enjoyable.
And in many of these episodes, I aim to share strategies that will work for both students and working professionals, because let's be honest, the skills that help a students succeed in school are the exact same skills that a working professional needs to succeed and work efficiently and independently in their career. [00:01:00]
But once in a while I come across a topic like today's episode that if I'm being totally honest is more geared toward either working professionals or students. All right.
Now today's episode is full of resume tips for students.
And the reason that I'm telling you this upfront is not to encourage working professionals to skip this episode. But to encourage everyone to listen all the way through. And then if you are a working professional, I want to see if I want you to see if any of the tips that I share today, you can adapt to your own resume.
And along the way, if I'm sharing a tip, that's really most effective for student resume and there is a better way if you are a working professional, I'll do my best to indicate those moments and to differentiate those strategies. Okay. Deal.
So now that that disclaimer is out of the way, a bunch of tips are coming up, and I think that we should get started.
[00:02:00] All right. So let's start with a basic question, which is who should have a resume. And the short answer, is that everyone in high school and beyond should have a resume. When I am working one-to-one with clients who are students, I usually have them develop their resume with me starting around 10th grade, which is when many students get their first job or their summer job.
Let me tell you it is so much easier to start a resume earlier than you think is reasonable because it's time goes on and you accumulate awards and experiences
you're going [00:03:00] to think you'll remember those things, but we don't.
And then later on, when you decide to go back and to build your resume, you have to go back in time and try to remember the dates and what you did and the names of things, and. Right? But trust me if you or your child or someone, you know, is in high school, that is really the time to build your resume.
Now would be a good time for a little shameless plug for me to invite you to share this episode with someone you know who could use some resume building tips.
If you are watching this on the learn and work smarter YouTube channel, you can simply tap that little share button below the video. It looks like a little arrow. Um, and you can text or email it to someone.
Or if you're listening to this in one of the podcast apps it works the same way. Just look for that little share arrow and it's easy enough to text or to email somebody that episode link.
Okay. Things like that make a world of difference. And I genuinely thank you. [00:04:00]
So if you are past high school and perhaps in college or graduate school, or probably college, probably not graduate school, and you don't have a resume. Okay. Of course it is not too late. And you would use all of the tips that I share with you today.
Simply start where you are. And then you build from there. Now, another reason why it is essential to start a resume in high school is because in high school, you're going to need a resume for jobs.
Yes. Like summer jobs or part-time jobs that you have during the school year. But also because you're going to need a resume for the college application process.
Okay, here are the scenarios that will require a resume in case you haven't bought into the idea that you really do need a, resume starting in high school.
So in addition to submitting a resume when you apply for a job, obviously, right, when you ask teachers to write your college recommendation letters, it is a thoughtful best practice to [00:05:00] include a copy of your resume. Trust me as somebody who has written I know hundreds probably at this point of college recommendation letters over 20 years of teaching, I really, really, really appreciate when students send me a resume along with their request to write the letter.
Why? Cause obviously if somebody is asking me to write a college recommendation letter for them, yeah, I know them very well, but there might be some things that I don't know about a student that would help me see the bigger picture and write a more complete and convincing recommendation letter.
Another reason that you're going to need a resume in high school is for the actual college application process.
I just mentioned this a second ago, but there are two ways that this will show up for you if you're applying through the common app, which is the portal through which you apply to college.
In the common app itself, in the section that goes to all the schools that you're applying to, there is a section that asks you to enter in all the [00:06:00] details of your extracurricular activities, including the description and what you did, and the dates- it's in the activity section. Applying to college is a huge process and it can be overwhelming.
And if you have a resume that you have been creating and developing and building throughout high school, this part of the college application process simply becomes like, Copy and paste. You go into the resume that you created and you copy and paste the bullet points in the language that you used in there into those individual fields inside the common app.
Now another place that you'll need to resume to apply to college is inside the common app you're going to find individual applications for each school that you're applying to. So let's say you're applying to 10 schools. Some of those schools are going to have an optional section for you to attach your resume. Okay. And you would absolutely do this.
My advice in general, in general, when it comes to the common app and two optional sections is that you do them. [00:07:00]
Okay. So obviously you can see that there is a ton of compelling evidence to create and develop your resume in high school.
To provide teachers who are writing your rec letters, uh, to create an easy copy and paste process for the activity section inside the common app. And to attach as part of your application to individual college applications inside the common app.
All of that in addition to using your resume to apply to jobs and internships. All right.
Let's move on to another important aspect about student resumes and what makes them different from professional resumes. You have to think about the purpose of your resume.
I just went over this, but obviously the purpose of your resumes to help primarily with college applications. Okay. Whereas the purpose of a professional resume is to help you advance your career.
Now with that said a student [00:08:00] resume because it has a different purpose, it's going to look a little bit different from a professional resume.
So student resumes should emphasize academics, job and work experience, volunteering experience athletics and activities, and skills, and yes, professional resumes will also feature some of these, but in a different ratio.
Okay. So, how do we do this? How do we have these sort of like sections that showcase different parts of you as a student? All right. How do we build a resume that features the right things to showcase you as the stellar student that you are? First, know that first impressions matter and your resume format should be clean and simple.
Now there is nothing wrong with using one color as sort of like a highlight or a graphic element, but the majority of your text should be [00:09:00] black.
Next. I suggest no more than two fonts.
You can use one font for your name at the top or for the headings of the different sections of your resume, which we are going to talk about in a moment. All right.
And then another font for all of this sort of like standard text and bullet points that you're going to include. If you want to use only one font that is great.
You would simply make your headings and maybe your name stand out another way, perhaps just using a bold version of that font. Or a larger size, which you should do anyway.
Next. You want to avoid graphics other than a social media icon, if you choose to include something like a LinkedIn profile or something like that.
Moving on- a general rule of thumb is that a student resume can be a little bit longer than a professional resume, but you should still have no more than the front and the back of one page.
So if you are creating this in Google docs or a word, it would look [00:10:00] like two pages on the screen, but printed out double-sided it would essentially all fit on just one piece of paper.
Now in contrast, the general rule of thumb for a professional resume is to have one page for every 10 years of professional experience.
So if you've been working for 20 years, it would be okay to have the front and the back of one page.
In general, if you've been working for less than 20 years, you would distill all of your career highlights into a single page. There are obviously exceptions to this, of course, but that is the industry standard.
Next, you want to keep in mind that your resume will most likely be read by a human and also by some kind of software.
Many hiring departments and even admissions offices use a software that can scan resumes for keywords that they're looking for. Especially with AI these days, software software can scan your entire resume and create an idea [00:11:00] of what skills you are bringing to the table.
Why does this matter? Well, that means that you want your resume to be easy on the eyes and easy for computer software to scan. So we are talking about being thoughtful about spacing and margins.
You want to use bullet points, and avoid big, long, complete sentences. I already mentioned this, but you want to use. Um, minimal graphics, unless you're inserting something like maybe, like a graphic line in between sections. Totally fine to use lines.
One strategy I like to teach my clients is to create a two column resume. One column is like, 25% of the page and the other column is like 75% of the page.
So not down the middle. The smaller column is for information that you want someone to be able to easily extract things like your name, your contact info, email. Uh, key skills, languages, maybe awards, references.
It can be really helpful to whoever is [00:12:00] looking at your essay, uh, essay... A resume to be able to skim quickly and pull out important information, and putting these details like in a smaller column, either to the left or to the right is excellent for that.
Another option would be to include that information in its own section, along the bottom of the resume. But that is up to you.
All right.
Speaking of sections, let's talk about this for a sec. Both student and professional resumes should have an objective statement at the top. The very top of the paper, paper resume. And objective statement is a simple one sentence statement that lets people know who you are and what you're looking for. And, and hear me out.
This is important to like zone out zone back in for a second. You change this objective statement depending on what you are using your resume for.
So if you are a student using your resume to apply to college, your objective statement... It could be something like. Um, [00:13:00] capable and motivated student looking to acquire education and skills in the medical field to ultimately provide service to the community. Or maybe skilled an ambitious student pursuing an education in computer science in order to create an impact in the technological frontier. Now, now, these are just examples that I'm making up on the spot, but you would cater your objective statement to who you are and what type of education, internship or job you are looking for. Honestly, a quick Google search for like student resume objective statement can give you some more ideas on the two that I just created out of thin air right now.
If you are a working professional, let's say that you've been in your job for 10 years and you're looking to move to another position. Well, then your objective statement would reflect. The position you are applying to. Whereas in the examples I just gave for students, the objective statement reflects the education they're looking to [00:14:00] pursue. Does that make sense? So your objective statement, students and professionals, goes at the top of your resume, a resume recipe.
Oh my gosh. So far we have essay and recipes. And you customize it depending on how you are using your resume.
And real fast, you might be wondering at this point, does your objective statement go at the very top? Like, where does this really go? Honestly, it depends on what format you're choosing to create your resume in, but most resumes you should have your name be the largest thing on the page.
And usually your name is at the very top, either center aligned or left aligned. And then your objective statement is the very next thing below that.
Again, depending on your style choices, you can have your name at the top and underneath that your key contact information, and then below that your objective statement. Okay. It's it's, there's a lot of personal preference you can work into this. Again, just do a simple Google search for resume objective statements, and then maybe search by [00:15:00] images so that you can get a sense. Of what this visually looks like on the page. Okay.
So back to the different sections of the student resume.
Below the objective statement you're going to have your first primary section, which for students is academics and you will label that section academics or educational history.
Okay. It's fine either. Either one's fine. If you are currently in high school, you would include the high school you attend, the town and state of that high school and the year of your anticipated graduation. If you are taking any advanced placement courses, that is something that you can add here as well, using bullet points.
And if you have a strong GPA that would enhance your resume. You could also include your GPA. Now, if you don't have a strong GPA. Just like low-key, don't mention it. Like don't include anything, referring to GPA at all.
This is also where you have some choices in [00:16:00] terms of listing awards and honor roll and things like that. Again, this depends on your styling and formatting preferences, but you can just list your honor roles in this section again, bullet points, or you can list those in a separate section titled awards that is up to you.
If you are a college student, then the first thing in your academic section will be the college or university you attend or attended.
Well, if your current college student would be, yeah, then you attend. And then below that, the high school that you graduated from. We always list things in your resume, in the newest or current things first. So kind of like reverse chronological order. So you list your college name, your intended major, or the diploma you're pursuing.
So something like candidate for bachelor of arts, 2028, something like that. And below that you can list your major or your minor, if you'd like. Again, if you have a GPA that helps your case, you can include it. But if [00:17:00] not just totally leave it off. If you're doing any independent research, like writing a thesis, you could include that in this section as well.
And of course, any awards, if you're choosing to list your academic awards in the section, or you can save those for a separate section titled awards if you have a lot of awards and recognition.
Now, this is where it gets a little sad for some of my students who I start working with in high school and continue working with through college. So in high school, your resume has a lot of details about your high school experience. But once you move on to college, your high school experience, it's reduced much more than you'd like it to be.
And sometimes we can make us a little sad. So if you're in college, you would simply list the high school you attended and the year of graduation. Right. If you were a valedictorian or salutatorian, you would list something significant like that, but all your honor roll stuff? Gone. AP classes. Gone. Because once you were in [00:18:00] college, your new emphasis is on what you are doing at that level. And the truth is that anyone looking to hire you for a job or an internship does not care about high school honor roll or AP courses.
All right, let's talk about the next section of a student resume. This would be activities and athletics.
Now let me start right off the bat by saying that if you have no activities or athletics at all, to include on your resume, I highly suggest that you get on that and you start doing something. Nobody needs to play. You know, like 11 sports and be the president of 19 afterschool clubs. But if you're using your resume to apply to college, You are going to need to show evidence that you're doing things with your time outside of school, and yes, this is different from work experience, which will get its own section.
We're going to talk about that in a sec. So in this section, you would include activities like your [00:19:00] role in afterschool clubs, um, student organizations, even activities that are not affiliated with your school at all. So let's say for example, that you started a, um, a community organization in your town.
Well, that would go in this section as well, as long as it's not like volunteering or community service. Cause that gets its own section. Right. Which you guess it, we're going to talk about it in. Um, in, um, a moment. But let's say you did like Tai Chi and it had nothing to do with your school or karate black belt, nothing to do with your school.
That would be absolutely considered an activity.
This is also the section where you would include sports teams you belong to, again, whether they're affiliated with your high school or any other. Uh, organization, you would include the name of the club, the years you were involved in, then. Pay attention right now.
If you have zoned out, I want you to come back. And I want you to listen to this closely. The information you include in the bullet points under the activities and athletics should be related to the [00:20:00] skills that you acquired from that experience. Okay let's say, for example, you played baseball for three years of high school. Sophomore junior and senior year. You might have one or two bullet points about, and you know, your team is with a team.
So something like state champions and whatever, and the date. Right. But you absolutely want to emphasize the skills you learned or used while on the baseball team.
So something like teamwork, collaboration, uh, cooperation, discipline, those types of things.
Now at the top of this episode, I mentioned that resume scanning software can scan your resume for key terms. And these are the types of key terms that people and software are looking for.
If you are applying for a summer job with your resume, they don't care that you were on the baseball team, but they do care about what skills you developed as a result of that experience. All right.
Let me give you another example. Let's say that you were the president of the best [00:21:00] buddies organization in your school. So on your resume, you would write best buddies and the years that you were involved, you would write your leadership role. So, president. And then in bullet points, you would emphasize what you did and the skills attached to those actions. So let's say that you planned 4 school-wide events a year to promote inclusion.
Okay. So you would obviously say that you did that, but you would also emphasize the skills that you used to plan that event. Uh, organization marketing creativity, spreading awareness about inclusivity. Right. Does that make sense? You, you want those words in there.
Now if you're a high school student, your resume should only reflect. Activities. From your high school years, you would not include awards and work experience and all those kinds of things that you did in middle school.
If you are in college, again, you want to focus your resume on college-era activities [00:22:00] and engagement.
So sadly, that would mean you would reduce pretty much all of your high school activities and school engagements that were on your resume. You'd reduce those to a bare minimum. You might keep your best buddies president role on your resume. Okay. As well as maybe being a captain on like a team or a lead role in a play, if that's relevant to what you're using your resume for.
That's key. And all the other smaller activities and athletics you did in high school would be cut. I know it is sad, but that is the process of taking a high school resume to a college resume. And then beyond that.
To take a resume from college to professional level, you would reduce everything down, even more.
All right the next section on your student resumes should be work experience. The section after this is community service and volunteering. And if you want to swap the order of the two, that's totally fine. At the student level, if you're using a resume for college applications.
Okay. So it's fine to go from, you know, academics or education [00:23:00] to activities and athletics, and then volunteering and community service, and then to work experience. But then once you begin using your resume for job related efforts, like. Getting a job, it's important that you move the work experience section closer to the top.
Cause that's obviously what, um, companies are looking for. I'm just letting you know that there's some room for your own personal preference and design in terms of the order of things. After your academics, if you're a student.
All right. So community service and volunteering. If me saying this right now, get few thinking like, oh no. I have no community service or volunteering.
Let this be a sign to go get some experience doing that. Again, if you are using your resume to apply to college and you are at a competitive level, you're going to need to have some kind of volunteer experience. Why? Because colleges want the type of student who has an awareness beyond themselves.
College campus is a [00:24:00] community, right?
And they're going to have a preference for students who have experience serving their community versus someone who has no experience serving their community. Again, this is just another plug for starting your student resume as early as freshmen or sophomore year.
Because if in the process of developing your resume, you realize that there are significant gaps in one of the sections, you'll have enough time to fix that. Right.
Okay. So for the community service volunteering section, you would list the organization that you provided service for or to. Your role, the dates you were involved in, and again, in a simple bullet point format, a few points about what you did in a way that emphasizes skills over actions.
All right. Another section of the student resume is work experience.
Some students start creating their resume before they even have any work experience. And that's totally fine. If you ever did any work for an aunt or an uncle or a family member or a parent, or you babysat, or you mowed someone's lawn, any of these can be [00:25:00] considered work experience. And it's perfectly fine to include them on the early version of your resume.
But be honest, do not make up anything don't inflate, how much you did or how long you mowed your neighbor's lawn for.
But at the same time, if you only mowed your neighbor's lawn, let's say like three times over a summer, it is perfectly fine to say that you did lawn maintenance in the summer of 2025. Okay. Something like that. And you would keep it general. But you'll have to keep it honest. And then you guessed it and you include the name of the organization you worked for, your role.
So that would be your job title if you had one. So if you worked at a cafe, you would include the name of the cafe and that you were a server and then the dates that you worked there. If you are still working there and you started like a year ago, you would say something like 2024 to current or 2023 to current, whatever.
You know, I've always a little hesitant to include dates when I'm recording these podcasts, because I don't want someone listening to this in the future, thinking that these tips have expired, [00:26:00] just because I am using like 2024 as an example, but I'm just trying to give an example and it's hard.
It's hard not to do without date, but. Underneath that you would include one to three bullet points about what you did in your job. Again, Obviously emphasizing a skills you used or learned.
Now, if you are wondering right now, um, what to write if you did uh, lawn maintenance or babysitting, or you did some sort of work for yourself and not in an organization. Easy, you just write self-employed or self where you would normally put in the organization name. All right.
Let me do a quick recap of these key resume sections before I move on to the final bit.
So at the top, we have your objective statement. Then your academic experience or your educational history- you can call it either one. Your activities and athletics as they relate to school or not. And [00:27:00] then your work experience. And then underneath that finally volunteering and community service. Now. Remember it, other than keeping academics at the top, you can change the order of the other sections to reflect what you're using your resume for. You would put the most relevant section at the top of your resume, if that makes sense. So if you're looking to apply to a volunteer position, you'd probably put the volunteer section at the top. All right. So here are a few other tidbits that students should include on their resume.
And I allude to some of these earlier in the episode, but here they are in a more like, um, condensed manner, I suppose. Definitely include your contact information, which is your full name, your email address, which you have. If you have a personal email address, I would use that one because it increases the lifespan of your resume.
You can include your preferred pronouns. Your phone number. And then if you have a LinkedIn profile, you could include your [00:28:00] LinkedIn handle there as well. Quick word about LinkedIn. If you are a college student, Create a LinkedIn profile. If you don't know how to do that, like Google. How to do that. Additionally, you would include what languages you speak.
Right? So if you are formatting your resume, according to one of my suggestions, which is to create a column on one side, a small column to the left or the right, and then a larger column, right. You would write the languages and underneath that, the proficiency of that language level, and this would all go in this small column. So I would write English in parentheses, I'd write native,
and underneath that I would write Spanish and I would either put non-native, fluent or proficient. One of my college majors was Spanish and I used to live in Spain, so I used to be a hundred percent fluent, but I don't know what's happening these days. I don't know if I would, I don't, I don't know.
I'd put like non-native fluent. Another section can be awards and recognition. If you included any honor roll recognitions in your academic [00:29:00] section, you do not repeat these over in the award section. Okay. This would be more for more like significant awards and recognition, whether they are related to your school or sports or performing arts, or an award from the community.
You put the name of the award, a few words about what it means. Sometimes you can pull that from like the website that, you know, the award is connected to whatever. And then the year you got it. If you have no awards or recognition at all, just leave that section entirely out. Another section that can be helpful on a student, resume is interest and skills.
These are actually two separate sections, so interest, and then, you know, skills. If your interests overlap with your skills, I suppose you could make it one section, Let me give you an example. You might have skills, right?
And then underneath that, and you've got a few bullet points, maybe listing like HTML or CSS. All right. Maybe another bullet point is auto mechanic skills. Maybe under that is, I don't know some other skill that makes you unique. You would [00:30:00] not include things like I can curl my tongue. We're talking skills that make you a valuable applicant to whatever it is that you are applying to.
And then finally include one or two references now references or people who have agreed to speak on your behalf if they are contacted by a school or a potential employer. For my personal coaching clients, I always let them list me as a reference. So they write my name, my phone number, my title, and my email. And in the past almost 20 years or so I have received countless phone calls and emails from potential employers asking me if I know so-and-so. And would they make a good candidate for whatever?
The key here is that you have to talk to your references ahead of time and get their permission to list them on your resume.
Um, if you're in high school, a quick tip would be to ask the teachers who you also asked to [00:31:00] write your college recommendation letters, right? You can like at the same time, you're like also, can I list you as a. Uh, reference, usually they're going to say yes, but you could also list a coach, a former or current employer. Maybe someone from a summer job.
Okay. What you cannot do is lists a family member as a reference. Family members do not count as references.
Okay.
We're getting close to the end of the episode here. And I almost didn't include this part because I feel like my precious listeners don't need to be told this. But I'm including this anyway. Never ever embellish on your resume. Not only is it wrong. But you will be found out. Yes. You will either be literally found out as they do reference checks or it's going to become obvious once you're in your new place of employment and it's obvious that you do not have the skills and experience that you claimed you had. This is not a good look. And it is not right.
Okay. It is perfectly okay [00:32:00] to start off with a modest resume. Every year you're going to have the opportunity to update it with truthful and honest experience and skills that you gain over time. Again, I know that my precious listeners did not need to be told this, but I had to include it.
I'm sure there are some additional resume tips that are going to occur to me the moment that I click off the camera and the mic. But I think that perhaps, um, we'll wrap it up for today.
If you have questions about your student or professional resume, then you can submit them in the form on the homepage of learning work, smarter.com. I appreciate you. Thank you for listening. And remember: never stop learning.
