The problem with a first CV is almost never a shortage of material. It is that the material is written as if it does not count. A student who ran a 200-person society event, tutored six children a week and built a working database for a coursework project has plenty of evidence — and usually writes three bullet points about a café job instead.
Employers hiring at graduate level know you have not run a department. They are looking for a much simpler set of signals: that you finish things, that you can be trusted with responsibility, that you have some idea what the job involves, and that you can write.
The order to put things in
Section order is the single highest-impact decision on a student CV, because it decides what a reader sees in the first ten seconds. The rule: whatever is your strongest evidence for this job goes directly under the summary.
| Your situation | Order after the header and summary |
|---|---|
| Student, technical role | Projects → Education → Part-time work → Skills → Activities |
| Student, non-technical role | Education → Experience (any kind) → Activities → Skills |
| Graduate with an internship or placement | Experience → Education → Projects → Skills |
| Graduate, career changer or unrelated degree | Summary → Relevant projects/courses → Experience → Education |
| Postgraduate or research applicant | Education → Research/dissertation → Publications → Experience |
Education, written properly
This is the one section where a student CV can afford detail. Give the degree, institution, dates and classification, then add only what is relevant: modules that match the advert, the dissertation topic if it is substantial, a term abroad, a scholarship, a prize.
BSc Computer Science, Mohammed V University, Rabat 2022-2026
Final-year average 16/20. Dissertation: anomaly detection in
water-network telemetry (Python, scikit-learn), graded 17/20.
Relevant modules: databases, distributed systems, statistics.Do not list every module you have ever taken. Four relevant ones is a signal; twenty is a transcript, and a reader skips transcripts.
Projects: coursework counts
A coursework project is real work. It had a brief, a deadline, constraints and a result — which is more than can be said for a lot of what appears on professional CVs. Write it the way you would write a job: what it was, what you did, what came out of it. If it was a group project, be specific about your part.
Campus Timetable API (course project, team of 4) Jan-Apr 2025
Built the Flask/PostgreSQL backend and the ICS export. Used by ~300
students in the pilot term; handled the timetable-clash logic and the
caching that kept response times under 200ms on the faculty server.Two or three projects, three lines each. If you have a personal project with real users — even ten — put it first: unprompted work is the most persuasive thing on a student CV, because nobody made you do it.
Part-time work is experience
Retail, hospitality, call centres, tutoring, campus jobs, family businesses, seasonal work. Employers read these for reliability and for how you handle people under pressure. Write them with numbers, like anything else.
| Written as filler | Written as evidence |
|---|---|
| Worked in a café. Duties included serving customers. | Ran the morning shift alone twice a week; trained four new starters on till and opening procedure. |
| Private tutor. | Tutored six secondary students weekly in maths for two years; five improved by at least one grade band. |
| Call centre agent (summer). | Handled 60–80 inbound calls a day on a billing queue; joined the escalation rota after two months. |
Note what the strong versions have in common: a number, and something you were trusted with. Both are available in any job, including the least glamorous one you have had.
Societies, sport and volunteering
These count when they carry responsibility, continuity or consequence — and not much otherwise. “Member of the debating society” is a line; “ran the debating society’s budget and booked eight external speakers” is evidence.
- Committee roles: say what you were responsible for — money, people, an event, a rota.
- Events: attendance figures, budget, sponsors, how many people you coordinated.
- Sport: level and commitment, especially where it shows discipline over years or captaincy.
- Volunteering: hours or duration, the organisation, and what you actually did there.
- Anything ongoing: a two-year commitment says something a one-off weekend does not.
The skills section on a first CV
Be conservative and specific. A recruiter reading “expert in Excel” from a final-year student assumes it means pivot tables, and a hiring manager will find out in the interview. Levels in words, in a grouped block:
Technical Python (coursework + personal projects), SQL (PostgreSQL),
Git, basic Linux
Tools Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP), Google Analytics, Figma (basic)
Languages Arabic (native), French (fluent, C1), English (professional, B2)What to leave off
- Secondary school detail beyond the qualification and year, once you are into a degree.
- “References available on request” — assumed, and it costs you a line.
- Hobbies with no substance. “Reading, music, socialising” says nothing; a two-year kickboxing club membership or a chess rating does.
- A photo, unless you are applying in a market where photos are conventional.
- Skill bars, star ratings and percentages against languages.
- An objective that restates the job title in your own words.
Keep it to one page, single column, with the same date format throughout. Most graduate schemes route applications through an applicant tracking system, so the same parsing rules apply as everywhere else — the ATS guide has the twenty-minute version, and the entry-level templates are laid out for a CV whose strongest sections are education and projects.
Nobody expects a first CV to be impressive. They expect it to be specific — and specific is entirely within your control.
Topics
- Students
- Graduates
- First CV
- Internships