You’re organized, have great time-management skills, and have studied hard to maintain excellent grades.
As you’re looking to apply for educational opportunities or one of your first jobs, you probably realize you need a well-formatted resume to present your top skills.
If you don’t have much work experience and are confused about where to start, our first year college student resume examples will have you covered. You can use them as a proven template for success in the process.
What Matters Most: Your First Year College Student Skills & Work Experience
Many new college students tend to get very stressed when choosing the right skills to put on a resume. What can you list here if you haven’t worked much?
Thankfully, you can still list many skills, even if you don’t have tons of traditional work experience. Aspects like time management or teamwork will apply to many entry-level positions.
Additionally, if you’ve completed any volunteer work or participated in school extracurricular activities, those will have equipped you with many applicable skills too.
Here are some of the most popular first year college student skills for resumes.
9 most popular first year college student skills
- Presentations
- Microsoft Office
- Customer Service
- Time Management
- Google Workspace
- Problem-Solving
- Conflict Resolution
- Multi-Tasking
- Typing
Sample first year college student work experience bullet points
For many first year college students with minimal work experience, looking at the big section where you’re supposed to list your previous work achievements on a resume template can feel daunting.
Fortunately, even if you’ve only worked at one or two jobs or none at all, there are still other experiences you can list that will show applicable abilities.
For instance, you could include numerical examples of grades you achieved, how you performed tasks more efficiently while volunteering, or where you placed in extracurricular competitions.
Here are a few samples:
- Scheduled time to study for 7 classes each semester, ensuring all assignments were completed on time for 2 years.
- Collaborated with team members on the school yearbook club and divided tasks to get all yearbooks printed and ready 5 days before schedule.
- Completed detailed research about advancements in ecologically friendly energy production for a sustainability research paper, earning a 96% overall grade.
- Created an Excel spreadsheet with feeding and exercise schedules while volunteering at a local animal shelter to improve accuracy by 58%.
Top 5 Tips for Your First Year College Student Resume
- Aim to fill up an entire page
- While a one-page resume might seem daunting for college students without much experience, hiring managers still want to see enough examples of your achievements. Lean on education, school extracurriculars, or hobbies & interests as needed to provide enough information.
- Consider an objective
- A resume objective is a great addition to first year college student resumes to show your top skills and how you’ll impact company success. For instance, you could say you’re a dedicated student who has maintained a 3.91 GPA for four years, and you’re ready to apply your detail-oriented abilities to achieve company goals.
- Proofread for errors
- When trying to present great academic ability, you want to ensure accuracy and organization throughout your resume. Proofread for any grammatical errors before submitting.
- Aim for a mix of hard and soft skills
- First year college students may include more soft skills when they don’t have much work experience. That said, aim for a mix here, adding some technical abilities like Microsoft Office or academic research you’ve gained through school.
- Use action verbs
- You may have learned about using an active voice for more impact when writing essays. The same strategy can be used in your resume by using action words like “organized” or “researched” in your examples.
Aim to limit your resume to a single page. Too many details can detract from your top skills, like presentations and time management, when hiring managers are quickly reviewing resumes.
Think of the job description like a class syllabus. Each one will have some unique requirements based on the company’s specific needs, so you should customize your resume accordingly. For instance, one retail store may emphasize a team environment, whereas another will have you working more independently.
Customizing your listed skills for each job and emphasizing examples with metrics like efficiency or accuracy will make your resume stand out. It’s similar to constructing a PowerPoint presentation with research, where you’d want everything to be data-based and targeted to a specific audience.
