Resume for an internship with no experience

Nobody expects an internship applicant to have work experience; that is what the internship is for. A recruiter hiring an intern is looking for three things:

• Proof you can build or do something in the field, even on a small scale.
• Signs you learn quickly: things you picked up on your own, and how far you took them.
• The basics: your degree, year, college and the skills the role needs.

Everything on your resume should support one of these. That is why projects and achievements matter more than a long list of certificates.

1. Education: degree, college, year of graduation and your CGPA or percentage. Add Class XII and Class X if you are applying through campus.
2. Skills: grouped, such as languages, frameworks and tools.
3. Projects: your main section. Two or three good ones.
4. Achievements: hackathons, contests, ranks, scholarships.
5. Positions of responsibility: clubs, fests, societies.
6. Certifications: only those relevant to the role.

Without an internship, projects do the job that work experience does on other resumes. Pick two or three, with the one closest to the internship first, and write each like a job:

• The problem: what it does and for whom.
• How: the tools you used, named specifically.
• The result: users, speed, accuracy, or simply that it is live and in use.
• A link: GitHub or a live demo, so they can see it.

For example:

• Weak: "Made a weather app using React."
• Strong: "Built a weather app in React using the OpenWeather API with 5-day forecasts and saved cities; deployed on Vercel and used by 60 classmates."

Academic projects count too. A semester project you built properly is better than a copied tutorial with a fancier name.

• Hackathons, including ones you did not win: what you built in 36 hours says a lot.
• Coding contests: a Codeforces, CodeChef or LeetCode rating, or a rank in a contest.
• Open source: even a few merged pull requests.
• College clubs and fests: running an event, managing sponsors or leading a team.
• Freelance or family business work: a website for a local shop, social media for a small brand.
• Teaching: tutoring, teaching assistant roles, running workshops.

List the skills you have used in a project or could answer questions on in an interview. Group them, so a recruiter can scan them in a second: languages, frameworks, tools. Leave out percentage bars and star ratings; they mean nothing to a reader and often break ATS software.

Not usually. If you add one, keep it to two lines and make it specific, or it wastes the best space on the page.

• Weak: "Hardworking and passionate student seeking a challenging role to grow my skills."
• Better: "Third-year B.Tech CSE student looking for a backend internship; built two Node.js APIs used by college clubs."

• Adding a photo, date of birth or a declaration at the end.
• Going onto a second page.
• Listing every online course you started instead of the two that matter.
• Skills you have only watched a video about.
• Words like hardworking, passionate and team player.
• A design with columns, tables or images that ATS software cannot read.

The same rules apply for commerce, marketing, design and other fields; only the proof changes. Case competitions, fest sponsorships, a social media page you grew, a market research project or a portfolio of designs all play the part that coding projects play for engineers.

The Campus template follows the education-first order placement cells expect, and Jake's Resume is the classic one-page layout for tech roles. If you are starting from nothing, Write with AI turns a few notes about your projects and college into a first draft you can edit. When you are done, run it through the free ATS resume checker.