Building Your CV for Summer Internships

Securing a summer internship can be a vital step in jumpstarting your career and gaining valuable work experience. It is essential to have a well-crafted Curriculum Vitae (CV) if you want to stand out from a long list of applicants. CVs are snapshots of your academic achievements, skills, and relevant experiences, allowing potential employers to assess your suitability for the internship. To create an impactful CV for summer internships, follow these key steps:

CV Buckets and How you can Work on Them

Academics 

Not much could be done about this section, but it is the section you will have in your CV; good or bad doesn’t matter. Mention the details of your 10th, 12th, and graduation; the information should include the name of the organization you did the particulars from and the score you achieved.

Work-Experience / Internships or Live Projects 

If you have work experience or have done internships or live projects, you must mention it, but that alone won't be sufficient. Write in detail what you did there and the change you brought. Try to mention numbers because numbers give tangibility to your Pointers. Say things like "driven sales by X%", "reached X Number people by managing a social media campaign". You can mention any rewards you received during your tenure while working in your organization. or a letter of recommendation you received during your internship.

During your MBA, you can get multiple opportunities to do live projects and internships from the college itself or platforms like LinkedIn and Internshala. Look out for these opportunities to fill your CV.

PORs

You can mention any position of responsibility you undertook during graduation. If not, MBA itself allows students to fill in this particular section of the CV. There are various clubs and committees that a student can take part in, and make this section of his CV look attractive. You can elaborate on this section by mentioning what you did while having that position. You can write about any event you organized or any situation you handled. This section shows your willingness to take the initiative and show your leadership skills.

Certifications

This section can be a lifesaver if you have an almost blank CV. There are many platforms like Udemy, Coursera, and others where you can do courses in your field of interest, like product management, financial accounting, investment banking, and more. Some of these courses have industry recognition and are offered by companies like Google and Meta. They provide you with a certificate of the course, and you can mention this in your CV. The good part is that these courses can be completed within a week, making it the easiest way to fill your CV. 

Extracurricular Activities and Achievements

This section covers any activity that is not part of your academics. It includes any sports activities you have done at the school and college level or if you participated in a college festival or won something for activities like sketching, singing, and dancing. You can mention all of these activities in this particular bucket.

Suppose you don’t have any particular thing to mention in this section. Look out for any competitions at your college level Or the popular case competitions in a B-School. You can even mention participating in these events, but winning the event is a much more valuable CV pointer.

Another part is the achievements section. If you have won any olympiad, cleared any government examination, received any notable awards like an award from the president or state governor, or had an excellent score in a competitive exam like JEE or even CAT and other OMETs, you can write this in your Resume under this particular section. 

There are some key pointers that one must follow:

Make your CV as quantifiable as possible. It makes a much more significant impact on your CV. Let me illustrate this with an example.

• I created an Instagram page to showcase my artwork.

• I created an Instagram art page having 20k followers, and one of the posts has over 1 million likes.

You can see for yourself the second point is much more impactful.

Don’t fill your CV just for the sake of filling it; avoid lies at all costs, and be thorough with your CV. Your interviewer may grill you on your CV, and if he starts doing that, he can immediately catch your lies.

Try that all the buckets of your CV have equal weightage and have some points in all of them. Avoid having a single bucket overshadowing your other buckets.

As an MBA graduate, your CV must fit under a single page if your CV exceeds a page. Try to make it more precise and to the point. Remove the points that don’t do much value addition.

Following these guidelines would help you make a very effective CV and give you a framework to work upon to get there. It would ensure you always get past the CV shortlisting round in your summer placements.