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Putting together your job and internship application materials and learning to navigate the application process is vital to obtaining professional experience and continuing to grow in your career. The process of applying to internships, externships, jobs, and other skill-building experiences can feel daunting at times. The first step is getting your resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn profile ready.
Before you start working on your resume and cover letter, go through the job responsibilities and think of how you will target your resume and cover letter based on those specific responsibilities. Here are tips on aligning your materials with the job description from Indeed.
Consider your value proposition. What can you bring to the position? How do you stand out from the others? Think about how you’ll share your story in your resume and cover letter below so the employer can learn about you and your career narrative. Here are tips on building your personal brand from Harvard Business Review.
When putting together your application materials, remember to use a variety of strong action verbs.
Learn about different methods to make impactful bullet points in your resume and statements in your cover letter.
For example, the STAR method includes thinking of the Situation (what was the project challenge?), Task (what were your responsibilities?), Action (what actions did you take?), and Result (what was the outcome of your action?) when writing your materials.
Likewise, the PAR method ensures you include the Problem, the Action, and the Results. “Provide tutoring” can be transformed using the PAR method into: “Tutored 10 high school students in pre-calculus on a weekly basis for eight months, resulting in 35% improvement in average test scores.”
Remember to lean on Making Waves or your college’s career center as a resource to help review your resume and cover letter.
Your resume introduces your qualifications and skills to employers. It provides a summary of your education, experiences, and skills. Resumes are used for a variety of opportunities such as applying for jobs, applying for leadership or scholarship programs, and they can be used for networking purposes.
Here is an overview of a resume and the sections you’ll need to complete within your resume.
Early in your career, your resume should include a header, education section, experience section, skills section, and honors and affiliations. This free resume template from Making Waves includes these sections for you to input your information.
If you need help getting started, here is our Making Waves AI resume builder. You’ll be prompted with some questions and as you provide specific answers, you’ll be provided with resume suggestions. You can also submit your resume here and ask for feedback.
A master resume document is useful to have as a running log of your experiences. Your master resume can include all your professional experiences, educational activities, skills, affiliations, and honors. Then pieces of your master resume can be pulled for your targeted resumes for specific employment opportunities, highlighting the most relevant facets of your career journey. A master resume also helps you celebrate all that you’ve accomplished and surface patterns in your career journey over time.
Here is a comprehensive Resume Review Checklist
Often required as a part of the application process, your cover letter complements your resume, providing you the opportunity to share more on how your experiences, skills, and interests connect to the position to which you are applying. You can think of your cover letter as a bridge.
This is a chance to share more about yourself, provide pertinent context, show your communication skills, highlight your specific strengths related to the position, and convince the employer to set up an interview with you.
The following cover letter templates and checklists were developed by our Making Waves team to serve as a starting point for young professionals finding their professional voice. The template includes typical cover letter components and should be further personalized with specific examples from past experiences that showcase your skills and qualifications for the opportunity
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the internet with over 1 billion users worldwide. If you’re applying for a job or internship, chances are the employer has a page on LinkedIn and the hiring manager has a LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn can be leveraged in a variety of ways including showcasing your personal brand and experience, leveraging for job or internship search, building connections and staying connected with your network, staying in the know about your industry of interest, professional development, and more!
A good profile picture on LinkedIn increases the likelihood of standing out. Members with profile pictures on LinkedIn can get up to 21x more profile views than other members without a photo.
Your background photo on your LinkedIn profile gives you a chance to further personalize your profile and give onlookers a sense of your personal brand!
Keep in mind that your headline is a part of your first impression – it’s the first thing recruiters and potential employers will see on your LinkedIn profile.
Career path example | Headline examples |
Student exploring future career paths | Aspiring software engineer | Proficient in Python and Java | Future educator, passionate about fostering student curiosity |
Undergrad student with limited work | Business student at UC Davis, specializing in entrepreneurship Psychology student at Arizona State University | Committed to |
Student with internship experience | Marketing Intern at Making Waves Education Foundation | |
This is a professional summary. It’s one of the first things a recruiter will read when they look at your profile.
The education section of your LinkedIn profile indicates what school(s) you’ve attended. One of the great networking benefits of listing your current school or alma mater, is that other fellow alumni may be more eager to connect and/or check out your profile.
The goal of the experience section is to show evidence of your career journey and growth. It’s a chance to expand on your career journey beyond your resume.
LinkedIn profiles have a skills section where you can add up to 50 skills to showcase your specific hard and soft skills. Including your skills and keywords most relevant to your industry can increase your chances of showing up in a recruiter’s search results and of LinkedIn sending you job recommendations based on their job search algorithms.
There are lots of ways to continue adding to your LinkedIn profile and leverage it throughout your career journey. Here are some additional options to consider.
CVs
A curriculum vitae, or CV, is a detailed document highlighting professional and academic history. It is typically for seasoned professionals and used for applying to academic or research positions, since they include more information on awards, scholarships, grants, coursework, research, and publications.
Portfolios and websites
Some industries may request portfolios of websites to see samples of your work. This is more common in fields such as writing, journalism, graphic design, photography, film, finance, marketing, fashion, architecture, and computer science. Here are several website builder resources from Indeed.
Keywords
Larger organizations and corporations often use technology, such as an applicant tracking system, or ATS, to manage the large volume of applications. These systems sort and score candidates based on relevancy to the position. Whether employers are using technology or real people to review resumes, it’s important to use specific language and keywords that can help your resume make it to the next round. Here are some resources for adding keywords into your resume.
Transferable skills
Some examples of hard transferable skills are technology (e.g., Google Workspace, Microsoft 365), computer languages (e.g., HTML, Python), language proficiency, people management experience, and project management experience. Examples of soft skills include critical thinking, written and verbal communication, problem solving, organization, teamwork, listening, and interpersonal skills.
Brainstorming around your transferable skills can help you in putting together your application materials for jobs where you don’t meet the exact levels of experience. You can also gain transferable skills from experiences beyond professional work experience. For example, if you’re applying for a marketing internship, but have not had formal marketing experience, you could highlight communication and writing skills from yearbook club or using digital tools like Canva and Instagram for a student organization or personal project.
Get guidance directly from our Making Waves community of coaches, career specialists, students, and college graduates.
If you’re a Wave-Maker college student or alum and would like support with your job and internship search strategy, please reach out to the Making Waves Early Career Team for a free meeting.
