One page, reverse chronological
For a student or new graduate, one page is the standard and enough. List experience newest first: employer, title, location, dates, then two to four bullets. Sections in a common order: education, relevant experience, projects, skills, and optionally leadership or activities. A clean, standard layout beats a designed one for almost every role.
Bullets are results, not duties
Start each bullet with a strong past-tense verb and describe what changed because you were there. "Built a scheduling tool that cut a weekly manual task from three hours to twenty minutes" beats "responsible for scheduling." Numbers help even when they are estimates. Cut anything that is just a job description.
Projects count
Coursework projects, a capstone, a hackathon, a personal build, undergraduate research — these belong on the résumé and often carry more weight than a retail job for a technical role. Treat them like experience: what you made, the tools, the outcome, a link if there is one.
Tailor for each posting
Read the job description and mirror its language where it is honestly true of you — if it says "cross-functional collaboration" and you did that, say it that way. This is not keyword stuffing; it is making the match obvious to a busy reader in six seconds.
The ATS is not a mystery
Applicant tracking systems parse your résumé into fields and let a recruiter search it. They do not "reject" you for a missing keyword by themselves. Avoid the things that genuinely break parsing — text in images, tables, headers/footers, unusual fonts — and you are fine. A human still makes the call.
Get it reviewed, then keep it current
Bring a draft to a résumé drop-in at Career Services; ten minutes with a coach catches what you cannot see. Update it every semester while the details are fresh, and keep a longer "master" version you trim down for each application.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Every office, person, building, phone number and statistic on this page is invented; nothing here describes a real institution or a service you can actually contact.