The new grad resume: what to write when your experience is school

Education goes on top — for now

Until you have your first full-time role, Education leads: school, degree, graduation date (month + year), GPA if it’s 3.5+ or the posting asks. Relevant coursework only if it maps to the posting’s requirements — “Data Structures, Distributed Systems” for a backend role, not a full transcript.

Projects are your experience section

Treat substantial projects — capstones, research, hackathons, personal builds people actually used — exactly like jobs: name, dates, and outcome-focused bullets. “Built a course-planning app used by 400 students; cut average planning time from 2 hours to 15 minutes” outranks any list of technologies alone.

Internships: results, not duties

One internship with two quantified bullets beats three internships described as “assisted the team with various tasks”. What shipped because you were there? What number moved? If you genuinely don’t know the number, describe the concrete artifact you delivered.

Part-time work counts more than you think

Retail, food service, campus jobs — recruiters read these as reliability, customer exposure, and working under pressure. One or two lines each, with anything measurable: “Trained 5 new hires; handled 100+ transactions per shift”.

Keep it to one page, single column

A new-grad resume over one page signals inability to prioritize. Single column, standard headings, real text — the same ATS parsing rules as any resume apply to campus recruiting portals, which are often the strictest parsers of all.

Match each posting before you submit

New-grad postings still keyword-screen. Paste your resume and the posting into our free ATS checker to see your match score and which required skills you list nowhere — it runs in your browser, free.