by Marianne Green
Will you be looking for that perfect internship to expand your horizons and build your experience base?
If your answer is "yes," you must have an up-to-date resume, ready to go at all times. A well-constructed resume, identifying your goals, academic background, skills, experience, and activities, is just as necessary for the internship search as it is will be for your job search later on.
So, it's never too early to get to work on your resume. With a resume in hand, you'll be able to respond to opportunities that come your way on the Internet, through networking, or research. The resume you design to land an internship will have much in common with the employment resume. The standard chronological resume includes the following:
- Identifying information (name, address, telephone, e-mail address)
- Objective statement (one line that gives your immediate goal);
- Education (name, city, and state of all degree- or diploma-granting institutions, plus your major, minor, and concentration.
- Relevant course work
- Experience (job title, company, city, state, and dates of employment, plus a description of your tasks and accomplishments using significant action verbs and key nouns.
- Activities
- Skills
Your internship resume will resemble the chronological employment resume with a few modifications:
- Write an objective statement that includes the word "internship" and your field of interest. For example: "Internship in human resources," or "Internship in financial services." You don't want a hiring manager to confuse your goal with that of a job seeker.
- Provide detail about your academic background, including relevant courses, GPA, honors, scholarships, etc. to indicate you are a quick learner and can effectively assimilate information. Include high school information, if helpful. Employment resumes usually eliminate high school activities, and tend to minimize or reposition detail about academic experiences.
- Include dates for education and experience, including your projected date of college graduation. Use academic units of time to pinpoint your dates: for example, Summer, 2004 rather than 6/03-8/03 or Fall, 2004 rather than 9/2004-12/2004.
- Include detailed information about activities: volunteer work, research, and leadership. It's permissible to describe relevant high school activities.
- List all jobs held, although they probably do not relate to your career goals. You will be communicating a strong work ethic, and you will be demonstrating some skills and accomplishments. You need your first internship to get you started with career related experience; you can't be expected to have it in the first place! Your employment resume will probably highlight your relevant experience and downplay or eliminate "survival" jobs.
- Identify your skill set. Put yourself in the internship manager's place; what skills do you think she would like to see in an intern? Computer skills? Foreign language? Organizational? Ability to coordinate? Research? Artistic accomplishments? Try to match your skills with those needed. (Don't forget to ask a counselor in your career services center to help you pinpoint these skills.)
- Limit your resume to one page. While it is sometimes permissible for the employment resume to run to two pages, the internship resume should be streamlined.