Since the ideal resume format can vary so much depending on the writer’s walk of life, we have decided to focus only on the resume construction for the entry-level candidate, either an undergraduate or recent college graduate seeking an internship, co-op, or full-time position. For this reason, the formatting advice we’ve compiled in the next three articles may differ significantly from much of the advice and alternatives you will find online, simply because we can afford to be more specific. We begin with formatting because before you begin to fill in the content of your resume, it will save you loads of time and effort to know what kind of layout and style you’re dealing with. To aid our discussion on formatting, we’ve created a sample resume, which you can find above. you can also download the original Word document as a template.

The resume format that is most conducive to the college student’s background is an eclectic one, because this is the nature of the college student’s life. During the past couple years, a college student is likely to have spent some time working, some in classes, some dabbling in extracurriculars, and still more with personal hobbies and projects. As a future or recent college grad, your qualifications are bound to spread across all of these categories, so the format we will outline is going to be made up of sections.

Header

As can be expected, the standard resume should begin with your name and contact info arranged in a polished looking header. As a college student, you will likely have two addresses, one permanent (where you’re from) and one local (your address at school). A popular, neat and compact way to arrange them is to put them in the top left and right corners. This is the placement we use in our sample resume, with the candidate’s name centered underneath as a kind of title, and an e-mail address underneath that. Since we included cell and home phone numbers in our sample resume, we placed them up with the addresses, but if you have only one it can precede the e-mail address. The reverse can be done with the e-mail address if you want to provide two. However many you choose to include, just make sure you provide at least one phone number and one e-mail address, as these are today’s primary channels of communication.

Sections

As an entry-level candidate, your resume should contain the sections listed below, or some close variation thereof:

Objective

Objective should always come first because the employer’s first concern will be whether you’re goal coincides with the position they’re looking to fill.

Education

Education will come second for an entry-level candidate because it’s really the corner stone upon which all of your other qualifications rest. In most cases, the pool of resumes that yours will be a part of will consist exclusively of other entry-level candidates, and so some educational points of comparison that lose significance later in your career, such as institution, semester standing, relevant courses and GPA, are important differentiating factors and should appear early-on.

Work Experience

Work experience should certainly come next, because even though it is less rich with selling-points than it will be later in your career, hiring managers still look at your experience with employment as a good prediction of your performance in their company. It doesn’t matter how well-prepared you are for the tasks at hand if you can’t deal with a professional environment.

Skills

Skills make up the fourth section in our sample resume, but this is really where you start to have some design freedom. If the position is highly technical, such as in any type of engineering or computer-related field, your skills are probably important enough to follow up experience directly. However, if you are applying for something more in the liberal arts realm, and computer skills are really more of an extra perk rather than a main selling point, it’s probably a good idea to move this section to just before the References section. In this case, it is often renamed to “Computer Skills.”

Activities and Honors

Activities and Honors is also a section where there are a few degrees of freedom. Its name implies a broad scope, simply because there are a lot of things college students find themselves wanting to include in their resumes that straddle the divide between these two categories. For example, is membership in an honors society an activity or an honor? How about being elected president of an organization? The duality of this section’s name caters to qualifications like these, but if all of yours fit neatly into one category or the other, you may consider splitting it. You may customize this category in other ways like changing “honors” to “awards” if this fits your content better, or even by changing “activities” to something like “leadership” in the case that you only have one activity but it showcases you in a leadership role.

References

The references section is really more of a formality for the average college student, as it often provides the name of a former employer or colleague that can give you a strong recommendation. A simple “available upon request” will substitute in just fine.

Knowing the major sections of you resume is the first major step in laying it out. In the next few articles, we’ll discuss some key organizational devices that will come in handy when formatting each of these sections, and other general layout decisions that you’ll need to make.

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