Watch the tense and the person. Past tense for work you finished, present tense for work you still hold, because it reads as ongoing responsibility. Avoid the personal pronoun entirely, since Harvard tells applicants not to use I, me, or my. Our guide to whether a software engineering degree is worth it covers what employers look for in a candidate, and our guide to the best computer science colleges in the US covers which schools build the projects worth listing.
What should you leave out?
Photo, date of birth, nationality, marital status, religion, and full street address. Every one of those is protected by anti discrimination guidance in the United States, and including them can only trigger bias. Also leave out a personal objective statement, which is a paragraph about yourself that the reader does not need. And leave out anything you cannot defend in an interview, including skills listed at an expert level that you have never used.
One more thing to leave out at this stage. A long list of every course you took reads as filler, and it is worse than nothing, because a recruiter may check one and find it irrelevant. Three relevant courses at the end of your education section is a signal. Thirty is clutter.
How do you make it work for applicant tracking systems?
Single column, standard headings, plain fonts, and no tables or text boxes. Applicant tracking systems parse a simple structure reliably and a designed layout badly, and the Harvard rules already point that way. Save it as a PDF, which preserves the layout when it is opened, and name the file with your name and the role, such as Firstname Lastname Resume.pdf. Check the exported PDF before you send it, because fonts shift and a line can wrap after export in a way it did not on screen.
Test it by pasting the text into a plain email or a text editor. If the order goes strange, the structure is too complex for a parser, and you should simplify it before you send it. Our guide to Harvard versus MIT covers the admissions side, and the Harvard career office publishes the full guide on its own site if you want the original wording.
How do you fill the page when you are a student?
With specifics. The class project you built and what it did. The internship where you solved a real problem. The club you led and how many people were involved. The research lab you worked in and the tool you used. A competition you entered and the result. Each of those is a line with a verb and an outcome, and three of them say more than a paragraph of adjectives.
Order matters more than people expect. Put the strongest evidence first, because the Harvard resume template format gives a recruiter about seven seconds before they move on. If your best work is a research project, list it above the class you took. If your best work is a paid internship with a number attached, that goes first too. Education belongs near the bottom for a student, and near the top only if the school name carries weight for the role.
Keep every line to one line of text. A bullet that wraps onto three lines takes up the space of three achievements, and it makes the page harder to scan. Cut the filler words first. Responsible for coordinating a team of five is weaker than Led a team of five to ship a scheduling tool that cut no-shows by a third.
One last trick. Before you submit, read every bullet and ask whether it would be true of someone else in the room. If it would, it is not yet specific enough. Then swap the order so the most relevant work for that particular role sits at the top, which is the one change that makes the same resume work better for every application you send.
Fazlur Rahman
