Resume Tips (for International Students)

<aside> ✨ Iscicle Tip: Curious to hear about how other students are finding jobs and internships abroad? Create a post on iscicle.com to find out!

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Your resume is a key part of the job application process, but most students get things wrong. International students, in particular, make some very common mistakes that we want to highlight - so you don’t find yourself doing the same things!

Layout

Honestly, the way your resume looks can be pretty standard. Microsoft Word and Google Docs have resume templates, and they work quite well. You want to remember that at most, someone is going to spend just a few seconds looking at your resume. Make information easy to read and absorb.

Header

Here’s what you want at the very top of your resume

What to INCLUDE	What to EXCLUDE
Your name	Marital status
Your email (school email is best)	Your address (seriously, you don’t need it)
Your phone number	Your photograph
LinkedIn Link
If relevant: Github link, Portfolio link, Personal website link

Education

You’ll want your most recent/current education listed along with the degree you’re working towards or have received. You don’t need to have a start and end date if you don’t want to, you can just include the end date (or expected end date). You can also include your GPA and relevant coursework, if you’d like. You can switch up this “relevant” coursework to keep it accurate to the roles you’re applying to.

Experience

When it comes to your experience, you want to focus on one primary thing: IMPACT.

You don’t need to share everything you did, nor does everything you did in a former role/internship matter. You instead should focus on what you impacted and how you did it.

Show the impact (or estimated impact/scale of impact) of the work you did because impact not only shows that people trusted you to give you projects that let you make a difference, but also that you did these projects well.
- In other words, a resume reader doesn’t just want to know what you did. They also want to know, well, was it any good?
Don’t leave the reader guessing, be as specific as possible
Be clear about the “so what” - why did it matter? One great way to do this is by showing the outcomes of what you did, especially using numbers if you can. For example, the project you worked on increased user retention by 10% - that “10%” is your impact quantification. This doesn’t work in all situations, but generally, numbers can be a quick and straightforward way to show the outcome of what you did

Projects