Education

The education section for both internship and new grad resumes should be the first section below your heading. This is because recruiters care first and foremost that your graduation date fits the timeline for the position they are recruiting for. Thus, you can make this easy for recruiters to find by including your graduation date along with the rest of your education section near the top of the resume.

Below is an example from Jake’s Resume which contains the basic necessities. Additional examples will show how to include additional components:

There are three crucial components:

• School name
• Degree and major
• Graduation date

In the example there’s also the location of the school and start date of your degree. For Jake’s Resume at least you may want to include these for consistent formatting with the rest of the sections of the resume.

If you’re unsure of your graduation date or there are potentially multiple possible graduation dates, use the earliest plausible date for your resume. This is advantageous because in general companies and recruiters prefer students who are closer to graduation. In some cases companies will even pay more for interns who are closer to graduation.

In addition to the crucial components, there are some other things that could be included:

• Overall or Major GPA
• Awards
• Coursework

For GPA, include one or both of your overall and major GPAs. Only include them if they are high (> 3.7/4.0). As well, ensure they are converted to a 4.0 scale.

For awards, include them only if they are substantial. This is subjective and relative to the rest of your resume

Finally, for coursework, include them only if your major is unrelated to software engineering but you want to signal that technical coursework has been completed. This means that if you are a computer science major, I would skip including coursework for software engineering roles.

With the additional components your education section might now look something like:

What about certifications and MooCs?

Certifications and massive open online courses (MooCs) are typically neutral at best to put on a resume for software engineering roles.That is not to say that they are not great for learning, because they can be, but they do not move the needle so much on a resume.

Some potential exceptions to this are listed below, but having these certifications without any work experience in these technologies are usually not such a favourable signal:

• CKA Kubernetes Certifications such as CKAD, CKA, and CKS
• Certain cloud certifications such as for AWS or Azure