Writing an internship CV that gets replies
One page. Your school, course and graduation date at the top, then the two or three things you have done that are closest to the job, each with a result. Say when you are free. Leave out anything a hiring manager does not need to decide whether to call you.
Most students applying for a first internship worry that they have nothing to put on a CV. You almost certainly have enough. The work is in choosing what goes first and saying it plainly.
What a hiring manager is checking
Whoever reads your CV, often a founder or a team lead at a small company, is answering three questions, usually in under a minute:
- Can you do the work, or learn it quickly? Evidence beats adjectives. A project you built, a page you grew, an event you ran.
- Are you free when they need you? If the dates do not fit, nothing else matters.
- Will you be easy to work with? A tidy, honest, well-spelt page answers this before the interview does.
The layout that works
- Name and contact. Email, mobile number, and a LinkedIn or portfolio link if it shows something. Your NRIC number, home address, date of birth and photo are not needed, and a CV gets forwarded further than you would think.
- Education. School, course, and expected graduation month and year. Add your grade only if it helps you. List two or three modules only if they are relevant to this role.
- Availability. One line: "Available for a 12 week internship from 12 May 2027." It saves a round of emails and shows you have thought about it.
- Experience. Internships, part-time jobs, freelance work, CCA leadership, hall and club roles. All of it counts, in that rough order of weight.
- Projects. School projects count if you did real work in them. Say what you did, not what the group did.
- Skills. Specific tools and languages: "Canva, CapCut, Google Analytics", "Python, SQL, Excel pivot tables". Leave out "hardworking" and "team player"; the rest of the page should show those.
Write every line as something you did
Each bullet should start with a verb and, where you can, end with a result. Compare:
- Weak: "Responsible for social media for the Business Club."
- Better: "Ran the Business Club's Instagram for a year; posted three times a week and grew followers from 800 to 2,100."
- Weak: "Part-time retail assistant."
- Better: "Retail assistant at a Bugis fashion store, 15 hours a week during term; handled the till and weekend stock counts on my own."
Numbers do not have to be impressive to help. They have to be true and specific. "Served 60 customers a shift" says more about you than "excellent customer service skills".
Change the top for each role
You do not need a new CV for every application, but the first third of the page should change. For a marketing internship, lead with the club account you ran. For an operations role, lead with the event you organised and the budget you tracked. The reader decides in those first lines whether to read the rest.
Mistakes that get a CV skipped
- Two or three pages for a first internship.
- An objective statement at the top that says what you want rather than what you offer.
- A design so busy the content is hard to find, or columns that turn to nonsense when an application system reads them. A plain single column is safest.
- Spelling mistakes, especially in the company's own name.
- A file called "CV final final (2).docx". Send a PDF named with your name: "Tan Wei Ling CV.pdf".
- Claims you cannot talk about in an interview. If it is on the page, expect to be asked about it.
Then use it once, not fifty times
On Worksider, you build a profile once and attach your CV to it. After that, applying to any internship that takes applications here is a single tap, and companies see the profile and the CV together. Make a profile, then see what is open.