Your first CV with no work experience: what to put on it and what to leave off

The problem with most first CVs is that they copy the shape of a professional one: a long experience section with nothing in it, and a skills section that lists Microsoft Word. A student's CV should be shaped around what a student actually has: education, projects, and proof of being reliable.

The one-page shape

1. Name, city, email, one link. A GitHub, a portfolio, a LinkedIn, whichever shows your work. Not all three.
2. A two-line summary. What you study, what you want to do, and one concrete thing you have built or done. "Final year computer science student at Minho. Built a bus timetable app used by two hundred students. Looking for a backend internship from June."
3. Education. Degree, university, expected graduation. Relevant modules if they match the role. Grades if they help.
4. Projects. This is your experience section. Three at most, each with what it was, what you built, what you used, and anything that proves it was real: users, a grade, a competition, a link.
5. Experience. Any paid or volunteer work, including the café and the summer camp. One line each on what you handled.
6. Skills. Only what appears somewhere above. Languages, tools, spoken languages with level.

What counts as experience

More than you think. A hackathon you entered. A student association where you ran the budget or the website. A course project with a real client. Tutoring. A summer job. A thesis with a company. Volunteering that involved organising people. Each of these shows a thing employers hire for: you finished something, you worked with others, you showed up.

Describe them by what you did, not by their name. "Treasurer, Engineering Students Association" says little. "Managed a twelve thousand euro budget for a two hundred member association, moved it to a shared ledger, closed the year on target" says a lot.

What to leave off

• A photo, unless you are applying in a country where it is expected.
• A list of every tool you have opened once.
• Hobbies that don't say anything. Reading and travelling tell a recruiter nothing. Captaining a team or running a podcast does.
• "References available on request." They know.
• Your full address, your date of birth, your marital status.

Writing the bullets

Every bullet should survive the question "so what?". Start with the verb, end with the outcome, and put a number in wherever you can. "Built a REST API in Elixir for the course project" is fine. "Built the REST API for a four person course project, used by the whole class for the final demo, graded 18/20" is better, because it answers three questions before they are asked.

Tailoring it per role

Do not write a new CV for every application. Keep one honest master CV and reorder it. For a data internship, the statistics project goes first. For a frontend one, the app. IdealJob's CV versions do exactly this: a version per role from the same facts, with the summary and skill order tuned to the posting and every change shown to you to keep or drop. Students get two months of Premium free with a university email, which covers an internship season.

The last check

Read the CV as the person who will see it: a recruiter with a hundred others in the pile and thirty seconds for yours. Can they tell in the first three lines what you study, what you can do and what you want? If yes, you are ahead of most of the pile.