Get shortlisted
No Internship? Resume (Word file + guide)
Riya's classmates got internships through an uncle or a referral. Riya got none. At a campus drive she asks Priya, the recruiter, straight out. Priya: "I do not shortlist on internships. I shortlist on proof that you built something that worked. Show me that."
6 min readFree, no email neededUpdated 11 September 2026
What recruiters accept instead
Riya's classmates got internships through an uncle or a referral. Riya got none. At a campus drive she asks Priya, the recruiter, straight out. Priya: "I do not shortlist on internships. I shortlist on proof that you built something that worked. Show me that."
Six things count as that proof. Every one of them is on Riya's resume, and each gets a page in this guide.
- 1Projects that someone used.Deployed, with a live link and a number of users. The strongest substitute by far.
- 2Hackathons, with a placement."1st of 28 teams" and what you personally built in the 36 hours.
- 3Open source, with merged pull requests.Merged is the word. Count them, name the repo.
- 4Freelance work, even one client, even unpaid.A client, a deadline you hit, a result they got. This goes under Experience.
- 5College roles written as responsibilities.Sessions run, money raised, attendance numbers. Never just the title.
- 6Coursework, one line, matched to the job.Only the subjects the job post names. Under Education, never its own section.
Priya reads for six seconds. She does not count internships. She counts numbers.
Projects and hackathons
A project becomes experience when someone used it
Say who used it, how many, and what changed for them. Then the stack and a live link. If nobody has used your project yet, get 20 classmates on it this week. That is a number.
Hostel Mess Feedback System: a web application using React and Node.js to collect feedback from students about mess food.
Built a daily meal-rating app adopted by the hostel mess committee; 310 of 400 residents rated at least once a week for two months. Cut the committee's weekly report from 3 hours of counting to a 10-minute auto-generated chart page. React, Node.js, PostgreSQL. Live link.
A hackathon is a placement plus what you built
Placement, number of teams, hours, your personal part. "Participated" is not a line. "Top 10 of 60 teams" is a line even without a win.
Participated in Smart India Hackathon 2024 and worked on an agriculture project with my team.
Winner, Smart India Hackathon 2024, College Round (1st of 28 teams): built the frontend and alerts API for a crop-price alert app in 36 hours, team of 6.
Open source and freelance
Open source: count the merged pull requests
Name the repo, count the merged PRs, say what each fix did. Two merged PRs in a repo people know beat twenty forks. Start with "good first issue" labels on freeCodeCamp, Hoppscotch or any tool you already use.
Contributed to open source projects on GitHub. Active GitHub profile with many repositories.
Open-Source Contributor, freeCodeCamp and Hoppscotch (Jan 2025 – Present): 6 merged pull requests, accessibility fixes in freeCodeCamp's UI and keyboard shortcuts in Hoppscotch, reviewed by core maintainers.
One client, even unpaid, is Experience
A coaching centre, a shop, your cousin's clinic. Name the client, the deadline you hit, the stack, and the result they got. Put it under the Experience heading; that is where Priya looks for it.
Made a website for a coaching institute in Noida using Next.js.
Freelance Web Developer, Shiksha Point Coaching Centre, Noida (Jun – Jul 2025): designed and deployed a 5-page website with an enquiry form and WhatsApp click-to-chat in 3 weeks (Next.js, Vercel); the centre now gets 30+ enquiries a month.
College roles and coursework
A title says nothing. A responsibility with a number says everything
Club lead, fest coordinator, class representative, NSS volunteer: all fine, if you write what you ran. Sessions, attendance, members, money raised, teams, events. Two bullets, both with numbers.
Technical Lead of the college coding club. Responsible for conducting sessions and events.
Technical Lead, CodeX coding club (120 members): ran 12 weekend DSA sessions for 60+ second-years, attendance grew from 18 to 45 by session six. Organised a 24-hour hackathon: ₹40,000 in sponsorship, 31 teams, zero downtime on the judging portal I built.
Coursework: one line, only what the job post names
Five subjects maximum, on the line under your degree. Never a section of its own, never the whole syllabus. If a course project was real, it belongs in Projects with a link, not here.
Subjects studied: Mathematics-III, Digital Electronics, DSA, DBMS, OS, CN, Compiler Design, Soft Skills, Environmental Studies…
CGPA 8.1 / 10 · Coursework: Data Structures, DBMS, Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Web Technologies
Riya's resume, the whole page
Final-year B.Tech CSE student (CGPA 8.1) who ships web apps people use: 3 deployed projects with 500+ users, a hackathon win and 6 merged open-source pull requests. Seeking a Software Developer role from July 2026.
Languages: Java, JavaScript (ES6+), Python, SQL
Web: React, Node.js, Express, REST APIs, Firebase, Tailwind CSS, HTML/CSS
Tools: Git, GitHub, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Postman, Vercel, Chart.js
Certifications: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (2025) · Meta Front-End Developer Certificate, Coursera (2024)
The whole Word file, shrunk to fit. No internship line anywhere, and Priya has more than 25 numbers to read in her six seconds. One column, one page, 41 lines.
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