Recent Graduate Resume Example

Recent graduate resume tailored for first jobs: relevant coursework, internships, projects, and student leadership. Uses the Classic template.

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New-grad resumes succeed on signals, not experience

For your first full-time role, recruiters know you do not have a long professional record. They are scanning for signals of potential: GPA (if strong), relevant coursework, capstone projects, internships, leadership, technical depth, and a portfolio. Lean into what you have built rather than padding job duties.

What belongs on the page

• Education at the top: degree, university, graduation year, GPA if 3.5+, honours, relevant coursework, and any thesis.
• Projects: two or three with the problem, your role, the tech stack, and the result.
• Internships and part-time roles: bullets framed by outcomes, not duties.
• Leadership and activities: officer roles, hackathon wins, club founding.
• Technical skills: languages, frameworks, tools you can defend in interview.

Project bullets that move new-grad resumes

"Built a Django-based course-recommendation web app for 3,200 students at my university using collaborative filtering on Banner enrolment data; achieved 0.81 NDCG@10 against the held-out term and was asked by the registrar to extend the project for the upcoming academic year." That bullet shows technical depth, real users, and outcome — better than three bullets describing classroom assignments.

Mistakes to avoid

• Including high-school information unless you are still in your first university year.
• Padding with cliches ("hardworking team player").
• Listing every Coursera certificate — pick three at most.
• Using a colourful template that breaks ATS parsing for your first role.

Internship bullets that feel professional

Internship experience can feel underwhelming on paper if it is described as a list of tasks. The fix is to write internship bullets as if they belonged to a junior full-time employee. Lead with verbs, name the system or stakeholder, and end with the outcome you contributed to (even partial outcomes count). "Shipped two new features in the customer portal that lifted week-2 retention by 4 percentage points" reads stronger than "assisted with feature development".

Coursework that earns space on the resume

• Capstone or thesis project with a one-line description and the outcome.
• Advanced electives that align with the role you are targeting.
• Group projects where you owned a meaningful component, named explicitly.
• Research assistantships with the lab, the principal investigator, and the publications or posters resulting from the work.

Side projects vs. school projects

Side projects you started yourself often carry more weight than assigned coursework because they demonstrate motivation. If you have one or two strong side projects, give them their own section above coursework. Include the problem, the technologies, the result (users, downloads, stars, traffic) and a link. For applied research, link to the paper or preprint.