Student CV: How to Write One (With Example)

To write a student CV, lead with your education, then fill the rest with projects, part-time work, volunteering, and skills. Education goes near the top because, as a student, it is the strongest and most current thing you have. Everything after it is there to prove you can actually do things, not just study them.

That is the whole idea behind a good student CV: you are not competing on years of employment, you are showing effort, ability, and a bit of direction. Here is how to build one section by section.

What order should the sections go in?

Employers scan a CV in seconds, so the order matters as much as the content. Use this sequence:

• Contact details — full name, phone number, professional email, city, and a LinkedIn or portfolio link if you have one.
• Personal statement — two or three sentences on who you are and what you are aiming for.
• Education — your course, institution, dates, and relevant modules or grades.
• Projects — coursework, dissertations, or things you built on your own.
• Work experience — part-time, casual, seasonal, internships, or placements.
• Volunteering and activities — societies, clubs, sports, community work.
• Skills — practical abilities that match the job advert.
• Extras — certifications, languages, awards, driving licence if relevant.

If you have done a placement or internship that fits the job closely, you can move work experience above projects. Otherwise leave the order as it is.

How to write each section

Contact details. Keep it to one line or two. Use an email address that is your name, not a nickname from school. You do not need your full postal address; your city is enough.

Personal statement. This is a short paragraph at the very top that tells the reader who you are, what you are good at, and what role you want. Be specific. "Hardworking student seeking any opportunity" says nothing. "Second-year computer science student with hands-on Python and SQL experience from coursework and a personal data project, looking for a summer software internship" gives the reader something to hold onto.

Education. As a student this is your headline section, so give it room. List your institution, your course, your dates, and your grade so far if it helps you. Underneath, add three or four relevant modules or a dissertation title, especially where they match the job. For more detail on formatting this section properly, see how to list education on a CV.

Projects. Give each project a title, a one-line description of what it was, and a bullet or two on what you did and what came out of it. A group marketing report, a coded app, a lab study, a short film — all of these count.

Work experience. Any paid work belongs here, even if it has nothing to do with your target career. A retail or hospitality job proves reliability, customer handling, and working under pressure, which employers genuinely value in a first hire. Write it as achievements, not duties.

Volunteering and activities. Societies, sports teams, student media, charity work, and event committees all show initiative and teamwork. Treat these exactly like jobs: role, organisation, dates, and what you did.

Skills. Split them if it helps: technical skills (software, languages, lab techniques) and transferable skills, which are the general abilities that carry from one setting to another, like communication, organisation, and teamwork. Only list things you could talk about in an interview. Never claim a level you do not have — one follow-up question is all it takes to expose it.

What counts as experience if you have never had a job?

More than you think. "Experience" on a CV means anything where you took responsibility and produced a result. For a student, that includes:

• Coursework and group projects — research, presentations, reports, lab work, and dissertations.
• Societies and clubs — committee roles, running events, managing a budget or a social account.
• Sports teams — captaincy, training commitment, organising fixtures, coaching younger players.
• Tutoring and mentoring — helping classmates, paid tutoring, peer mentoring schemes.
• Side projects — a website, a small business, a YouTube channel, an app, an art commission.
• Casual and unpaid work — babysitting, shop shifts, family business help, festival stewarding, work shadowing.

The test is simple: did you take responsibility for something, and can you describe what happened? If yes, it belongs on your student CV. If you are starting from a completely blank page, our guide on how to write a CV with no experience goes deeper on this.

Where you can, add a number or an outcome. "Ran the society Instagram account, growing followers from 200 to 600 over one year" lands far better than "responsible for social media." Only use numbers you can actually back up — an honest, modest figure beats an impressive invented one every time, because you will be asked about it.

What does a student CV look like?

Here is a short outline you can copy the shape of:

Amina Khan Manchester · amina.khan@email.com · 07xxx xxxxxx · linkedin.com/in/aminakhan

Personal statement Second-year Business Management student with practical experience in customer service and event organisation. Strong on data handling and teamwork. Seeking a summer marketing internship.

Education BSc Business Management, University of Manchester — Sep 2024 to present (predicted 2:1) Relevant modules: Consumer Behaviour, Marketing Analytics, Business Statistics A-Levels: Business (A), Economics (B), Psychology (B) — 2024

Projects Consumer Behaviour group report (2025)

• Surveyed 80 students on buying habits and analysed the results in Excel.
• Presented the findings to a seminar group of 30; report graded 72%.

Work experience Sales Assistant, Retail Store, Manchester — Jun 2024 to present (part-time)

• Handled up to 100 customer transactions per shift during peak trading periods.
• Trained two new starters on the till system.

Volunteering Social Media Officer, Business Society — Oct 2024 to present

• Grew the society Instagram account from 200 to 600 followers in one year.
• Promoted six events, with attendance up on the previous year.

Skills Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP) · Google Analytics · Canva · Presenting · Customer service

Extras Full UK driving licence · Urdu (fluent) · Google Analytics certification (2025)

Notice how thin the "real job" content is, and how complete the CV still feels. That is the effect you are aiming for.

How do you make a student CV stand out?

Tailor it. Read the job advert, note the words and requirements it repeats, and make sure those appear naturally in your CV wherever they are genuinely true of you. One CV aimed carefully at a single role will do more for you than a generic one sent to twenty.

Then keep the presentation simple. Clear headings, consistent date formats, no photo for most English-speaking markets, and a plain readable font at a comfortable size. Save it as a PDF so your layout does not shift on someone else's screen, and name the file something sensible like amina-khan-cv.pdf rather than cv-final-v3.pdf. Proofread it twice, then ask someone else to read it — typos are the easiest thing to fix and the quickest way to lose a reader's attention.

Key takeaways

• Lead with education, then projects, work experience, volunteering, and skills.
• Widen your definition of experience — coursework, societies, sports, tutoring, and side projects all count.
• Describe outcomes, not duties, using honest numbers where you actually have them.
• Tailor each CV to the words and requirements in the job advert.
• Keep the layout simple and send it as a PDF with a sensible file name.

Your first CV is mostly a framing exercise. You almost certainly have more to say than you think — the work is in describing it clearly and honestly.

If the blank page is the hard part, build your CV free with CVify AI. It turns a few plain details about your course, projects, and part-time work into achievement-focused bullet points and exports a clean, ATS-friendly PDF, so your student CV looks the part before your first application goes out.