12 Tips to Build the Perfect High School Resume

High school isn’t too early to build a resume — a comprehensive, well-structured resume can help you explore professional opportunities while still in high school! Not only that, writing your resume involves considerable self-assessment. You’ll have to spend time thinking about the skills, interests, and achievements that you can include in your resume and those you’d like to acquire in the future.

A resume would also help with —

• College and scholarship applications: Universities may request a resume as part of the application process. A well-crafted resume provides admissions officers an understanding of your skills, experiences, and achievements beyond grades and test scores. Similarly, if you’re applying for scholarships, a resume can demonstrate your participation in extracurricular activities, volunteer work, and other accomplishments, which can increase your chances of receiving financial aid.

• Pre-college program applications: Many pre-college programs, camps, workshops, and enrichment programs could ask for a resume as part of the application process. Even if one doesn’t ask for a resume, including it in your application would only be valuable! It allows program administrators to assess your qualifications and interests beyond what transcripts or recommendation letters can offer. 

• Research opportunities: Several universities, hospitals, labs, government agencies, and other institutions offer paid and unpaid research opportunities for high school students. While applying to these programs, especially those that are selective, a resume can help you stand out, showcasing your drive and passion for the field.

• Internship and job applications: If you’re looking to earn a little money while in high school, part-time jobs and internships are worth considering. For these, recruiters would rely on your resume to learn about your previous work experience (if any), skills, and interests and determine if you are a good fit for the role! 

Regardless of the kind of opportunity, a solid resume can help you stand out among your peers and demonstrate your willingness to learn and develop professionalism while still in high school. 

Now, here are 12 tips to build the perfect high school resume.

1. Track your experiences

Start keeping track of your participation in extracurricular activities, clubs, sports, volunteer work, internships, and other relevant experiences as early as possible. Have a list that you keep adding to, so when you do need a resume, you’ll have all the information at hand. Don’t wait till your senior year to compile everything! That will just make it harder to recall key details associated with each experience. Also, continuously update the list of activities and experiences as and when you participate in them or acquire new skills. This ensures that your resume stays updated.

Note: While recording experiences, do not forget to add important details such as the name of the organization, team, or club you joined, your role or position, date and duration of participation, hours spent per week or month on the activity, and notable achievements or responsibilities.

2. Get the structure and order right

Here’s a rough structure that resumes typically follow:

• Header: Consists of details like your name, location/address, contact number, and email address. This is usually right on top.

• Objective or summary (optional): This is a brief statement summarizing your career goals, interests, and key qualifications.

• Education and academic achievements: This section should have the name of your high school, location, and expected graduation date along with academic experience, honors/awards, and other details.

• Experience and/or extracurricular activities: This can be a single or two separate sections (depending on your work experience).

• Skills: This is where you can list your technical and soft skills. 

• Additional sections could be added to discuss interests, hobbies, and publications (if applicable).

You can organize all the information on your resume within this structure using a system that works for you and highlights your skills in the best way. The most common format is chronological, where you go from your most recent qualifications and experiences to the least recent. Another way to structure the resume is by the importance or relevance of the experiences and acitivies. So, if you’re applying for a computer science opportunity, you might want to have a relevant experience like a computer science course or workshop you completed right on top. Alternatively, you can start with the most prestigious program experience to ensure it won’t be missed! 

3. Highlight education

Ideally, a resume should be divided into sections like work and other experiences, education, skills, and hobbies. In high school, work experience can be limited, so it is important to have a detailed education section to showcase your strengths, interests, and background. Recruiters, program administrators, and college admission officers realize that for now, school would probably be your most defining and only work experience, as such. So, you should highlight your participation in school, both in the classroom and beyond, with your extracurriculars. The education section on your resume can include:

• Coursework and GPA: List all courses that emphasize your skills relevant to the opportunity you’re applying for (internship, pre-college program, or college). These might include courses that involved technical skills, like economics, math, or computer science, or those that highlight creative and soft skills, like visual arts and English. Also, mention your strong grade point average (GPA). A strong GPA could be a key criterion that makes you solid applicant for the opportunity. Additionally, if you have received any honors or awards in school, you should add them in this section to highlight your academic achievement.

• Relevant projects: If you’ve participated in class projects that are relevant to the program you are applying to, you should list and briefly describe them. 

• Certifications and online courses: Add any out-of-school courses you have completed as well as certifications you have received to the section.

4. Emphasize your skills

Soft skills are traits typically inherent to your personality. They are not technical or ob-specific skills. Instead, soft skills are an indication of the way you work, your professional attitude and so on. For instance, communication skills, teamwork, attention to detail, leadership, and problem-solving, are some of the common soft skills recruiters seek in candidates. These skills are also transferable, i.e., applicable across roles, careers, and industries. These skills can help those looking at your application see how you would be a great fit for the opportunity.

You can highlight these skills under the education and experience sections or list them under a dedicated skills section. Here’s an example on how you could highlight leadership skills: “Led my junior high school team to the final round of state debate competition and qualified for the national competition.”

5. List notable experiences

It is common for high school students to have minimal work experience. However, if you took up a part-time job over the summer, internship(s), tutoring work, or any other similar experiences, then these would be crucial additions to the work experience section on your resume. The experience section is also the right place to mention your extracurricular activities and volunteer work, as they can indicate to the recruiters that you can balance multiple responsibilities. For instance, you can highlight your participation in clubs (like a quiz or debate club), sports, student council work, and volunteer work in this section. The goal here is to demonstrate your willingness to learn beyond schoolwork, work as a team player, and explore interests.

6. Quantify accomplishments

Try to use numbers to quantify your achievements at a previous internship, part-time job, community service, or other extracurricular activities. For example, if you played an important role in helping an organization raise money for a mission, you can discuss your role along with the amount of money you helped raise. Numbers demonstrate results, providing concrete evidence of your skills and contribution. They also grab the reader’s attention when they skim the resume.

7. Use action verbs

Action verbs in your resume help the reader see you as someone who is proactive, as opposed to a passive spectator. You can use words like led, achieved, managed, developed, coordinated, created, analyzed, and designed, among others, to describe your experiences, achievements, and roles under various sections. The use of action verbs can indicate that you can be motivated and enterprising when it comes to work and academics. They also help you avoid any ambiguity in your role or work descriptions, as you can use action words to tell the reader in exact terms the part you played in accomplishing a task or goal.

8. Make the resume easy to skim through

Recruiters and admissions officers are known to skim resumes, especially if they get a high number of applications. So, it’s important to make your resume easy to read and understand quickly.

• You should divide all information into distinct sections using clear headings in bold and/or larger fonts and bulleted lists.

• Choose a clear, fuss-free font like Arial, Cambria, Garamond, and Times New Roman.

• Avoid going with colorful, busy designs. While it might be tempting to make your resume stand out with a bold design, you should go with a straightforward, clean design to ensure that it is easy to read. 

• Bonus tip: You don’t have to spend a lot of time on the resume design. Just choose a resume template from the several available online and begin placing text on the template.

9. Use AI tools

While you should write your own resume to ensure it reflects your personality and accurately describes your experiences, you can always use AI tools like Rezi, Kickresume, and Skillroads, among others, to help you perfect the document.

AI tools can help you fix formatting issues, check grammar, and improve the overall language used in the document. Resume-writing AI tools also give various templates to choose from, which can save you time designing the format and help you quickly get started on the content itself. Another benefit of using AI is that the tools can add industry-specific language to your resume. For instance, if you are applying for an internship in a field like engineering, IT, or other STEM subjects, AI tools can help you find the right keywords and technical terms to demonstrate your familiarity with the latest tools, software, and methods used in the industry. Similarly, when applying to accounting opportunities, AI tools can help you find terms like “financial analysis” and “auditing” and add them to your resume.

10. Proofread thoroughly

When you’re done writing your resume, come back to the document after stepping away from it for at least 24 hours and reread it thoroughly. Returning to the resume a day or two later can help you look at it with fresh eyes and easily spot spelling, grammar, and formatting errors. You can also use tools like Grammarly to find errors, if any, and improve the phrasing. It is important to ensure you have an error-free resume, as typing errors, spacing issues, and incorrect sentences can negatively impact the first impression a recruiter forms. It also indicates a lack of attention to detail. So, go through the resume multiple times to ensure it is accurate and clear. 

11. Get another pair of eyes

Consider asking your parents, teachers, and/or school counselor to look through your resume and offer feedback. This will not just get you a second round of proofreading, but also help you confirm that you haven’t missed any key details. Teachers and counselors, in particular, can point out extracurricular activities or experiences that you missed and even help you tweak descriptions to highlight more relevant skills. Their feedback can help you determine if your resume accurately represents your skills, experiences, and achievements. It may also give you valuable insights regarding the format and language and make improvements, if necessary.

12. Tailor the resume

Your resume should be edited and revised for each opportunity you apply to. Tailoring the resume helps you align your qualifications, skills, and experiences with the specific requirements of the role or program. So, you should be prepared to edit and tweak your resume based on the program, internship, or job that you’re applying to. For instance, you should read the program or internship description and then highlight or restructure experiences and achievements that seem relevant to the role. This helps you demonstrate to those reviewing your application that you are a good fit for the role. 

Final thoughts

You can find numerous step-by-step guides, resume-writing tools, templates, and samples online to craft the perfect resume. But, the most important thing, arguably, is to keep your resume as honest and accurate as possible. Avoid exaggerating or fabricating skills, experiences, and achievements, as this information can be easily verified and damage your credibility. 

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Stephen is one of the founders of Ladder Internships and a Harvard College graduate.