CV template
Student & graduate CV template
A student CV is not a thin version of a professional one; it is a different document with its own logic. Education leads, projects and society roles stand in for employment, and every line answers the only question the reader has: can this person show up, learn fast and produce work?
Student & graduate CV — Modern template
Preview it with real student content
Modern's two-column layout keeps a shorter history looking complete and intentional: skills, languages and interests fill the sidebar while education and projects carry the main column. Nothing on the page reads as padding.
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The structure that works without work history
Order matters more on a student CV than any other. Lead with education (degree, institution, expected grade, the modules relevant to the job), then projects and coursework, then part-time work and volunteering, then skills. Recruiters at graduate employers read in exactly that order, and a student CV that opens with a supermarket job buries its strongest material.
Everything on the page is evidence of the same three claims: reliability, learning speed, and output. A dissertation is output. A society treasurer role is reliability. Teaching yourself Python for a project is learning speed. Frame each item to make one of those claims, and cut anything that makes none of them.
Projects are your experience section
Coursework, dissertations, hackathons, personal projects and society initiatives should be written exactly like job bullets: what you built or investigated, how, and what came of it. "Final-year project: built a demand-forecasting model in Python on three years of retail data; graded 78% and shortlisted for the department prize" reads like experience, because it is.
Two or three well-described projects beat a long list. If the job is technical, link the repo or a live demo; if it is not, a one-line result (grade, adoption, audience) still turns a course into a credential.
Part-time work counts more than students think
Bar shifts, retail, tutoring and delivery work carry real signal: turning up for 6am shifts through exam season is exactly the reliability employers are trying to screen for. Write one or two bullets per job with a concrete detail: tills balanced, weekend rushes handled, new staff trained, regulars remembered. Do not apologize for these jobs and do not inflate them; plain confidence is the right register.
Society and volunteering roles convert even better because they usually involve ownership: budgets managed, events run, memberships grown. "Ran the 200-member film society's programming and doubled screening attendance" is a management bullet, whoever wrote it.
What to cut, and the one-page rule
One page, no exceptions, and reaching it honestly means cutting: GCSE-level detail once you have A-levels or a degree, generic skills ("Microsoft Word", "teamwork") without evidence, hobby lists that say nothing ("socializing with friends"), and objective statements. Keep interests only when they are specific enough to start a conversation: "marathon training", not "sports".
Steal this wording
Example student summary
Final-year computer science student at the University of Bristol (predicted 2:1) with a focus on data engineering. Built a demand-forecasting model on real retail data for my dissertation (shortlisted for the department prize) and interned at a fintech startup where my data-cleaning pipeline is still in use. Three years of part-time work funding my degree; comfortable being the person who shows up.
Example achievement bullets
- Final-year project: built a demand-forecasting model in Python (pandas, scikit-learn) on three years of retail data; graded 78% and shortlisted for the department prize
- Summer intern at Lumafin: built the CSV-ingestion pipeline that replaced manual imports, still in production a year later
- Treasurer of the 200-member Computing Society: managed a £4k budget, ran 12 events, grew sponsorship 50%
- Tutored GCSE maths to 6 students over two years; all improved by at least one grade
- Worked 15 hours weekly at a busy cafe through term time while maintaining a 2:1 average, trained 4 new starters
Adapt the numbers and systems to your own work — never copy a claim that isn't true of you. The structure is the part worth stealing.
Keywords that get searched
Skills to include on a student CV
Hard skills
Soft skills — shown, not listed
List hard skills verbatim; prove soft skills inside your bullets instead of naming them.
Questions, answered
How do I write a CV with no work experience at all?
Should my CV be one page as a student?
Do I include my grades and predicted degree class?
Does a supermarket or cafe job belong on a graduate CV?
Should I tailor my CV for each graduate application?
Other roles
CV templates for related roles
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