Student CV Examples That Work — Even With Nothing to Put In Them
Two full student CV examples (business and computer science), before/after bullets, two summary formulas, and the section order recruiters expect.
Canonical: https://www.prezumi.com/blog/student-cv-examples
A student CV should contain, in this order: contact details, a two- or three-line summary, education, projects, work experience if you have any, and a short skills section. Education goes first because your degree is currently your strongest credential. Projects go second because they are the closest thing you have to a track record. Part-time and seasonal jobs come after that, and the whole document fits on one page.
Recruiters spend roughly seven seconds on a first scan, a widely cited industry figure, so the top third of a student CV has to carry the degree, the graduation year, and one concrete thing you have built, analysed, or organised. A student CV is judged on signals of potential, and a semester project with a real dataset is a stronger signal than most job titles a student could plausibly hold.
Students underrate what counts as evidence on a CV. Coursework with a real deliverable, a thesis topic, group projects, society committee roles, hackathons, tutoring, an exchange semester, a summer in retail: all of it is usable. The rest of this article shows what that looks like on the page.
A full student CV example: business student, marketing internship
Meet Maya, a fictional second-year business student applying for a summer marketing internship. Here is her one-page CV, followed by notes on why each part is written the way it is.
Maya Okafor
Leeds, UK · maya.okafor@email.com · linkedin.com/in/maya-okafor
Summary
Second-year BSc Business Management student at the University of Leeds, focusing on consumer behaviour. I run the social media for the university's 600-member Marketing Society and grew event signups by about half over two terms. Looking for a summer internship in brand or social media marketing.
Education
BSc Business Management, University of Leeds — 2024 to 2027
- On track for a 2:1. Relevant modules: Consumer Behaviour, Marketing Analytics, Digital Business.
- Second-year project: a positioning study of three UK meal-kit brands, based on a 140-response survey I designed and ran.
Projects and activities
Social Media Lead, Leeds University Marketing Society — Sep 2025 to present
- Plan and publish three posts a week across Instagram and TikTok for a 600-member society.
- Grew average event signups from about 30 to about 45 by testing posting times and formats.
Course project: meal-kit brand positioning study — Spring 2026
- Designed the survey, collected 140 responses, cleaned the data in Excel, and presented findings to a seminar group of 40.
- Graded 74%; the lecturer kept the slide deck as an example for next year's cohort.
Work experience
Sales Assistant, Boots (Leeds) — Jun to Sep 2025
- Worked weekend tills and stock during the summer rush; trained two new starters in my second month.
Skills and languages
Excel (pivot tables, lookups) · Canva · Instagram and TikTok analytics · French (B1)
What makes this CV work:
- The summary names the degree, the year, one number, and the target role. A recruiter learns who Maya is in three lines.
- The society role is written like a job, with a cadence (three posts a week) and a result (signups up by half). Committee roles earn that treatment when you describe what you actually did rather than the title you held.
- The course project carries its grade and its audience. "Graded 74%" is a verifiable outcome, and presenting to 40 people shows she can stand up and talk.
- The retail job gets one line and still earns its place. Training new starters two months in says more about reliability than any adjective would.
A contrast example: computer science student
Technical student CVs follow the same order, but the projects section does more of the work. Here is the core of a CV for Daniel, a fictional third-year computer science student applying for a 12-month placement.
Summary
Third-year BSc Computer Science student at the University of Manchester. Built a bus-arrival prediction app on open transit data that has around 200 monthly users. Looking for a 12-month software engineering placement starting summer 2026.
Projects
Bus arrival predictor — Python, FastAPI, React (course project, since maintained)
- Trained a regression model on open transit feeds; the app serves around 200 monthly users.
- Deployed it on a free-tier server and wrote both the API and the frontend. Code on GitHub.
HackTheNorth 2025 — team of four
- Built a receipt-splitting app in 36 hours; placed in the final eight of roughly 60 teams.
Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Programming — Jan to May 2026
- Ran weekly lab sessions for 25 first-years and marked their fortnightly exercises.
The details worth copying: the stack is named inside each project title, every project has a scale figure even when the figure is small, and anything that runs gets a public link. Two hundred users is not a startup, but it proves the thing exists and that someone besides the marker has used it.
For students like Daniel, a portfolio matters as much as the CV, because a project is more convincing as a screenshot and a working link than as two bullets. Prezumi builds a resume and a matching portfolio from the same profile, so the bullets and the proof stay in sync; there are more examples of how students use it on the blog.
How to write each section
The summary
Three sentences: who you are (degree, year, university), one piece of evidence, and what you are applying for. Skip objective-statement filler like "seeking to leverage my skills" and say the target role plainly. Two more examples for other fields:
- "Final-year Mechanical Engineering student at TU Delft, writing a thesis on low-cost wind turbine blades. Comfortable in MATLAB and SolidWorks after three design-build modules. Looking for a graduate role in renewable energy."
- "Second-year Psychology student at the University of Glasgow. Tutored GCSE maths for two years and run the statistics study group for my course. Applying for a summer research assistant position in the developmental psychology lab."
Turning coursework and projects into bullets
The pattern is what you did, at what scale, with what outcome. Grades, response counts, audience sizes, and team sizes all count as outcomes. Five rewrites:
Before: Studied Marketing Analytics. After: Analysed a year of sales data for a case-study retailer in Marketing Analytics; final report graded 75%.
Before: Group project on sustainability. After: Led a four-person project auditing a local café's packaging costs; our model showed an 18% saving and the owner asked to keep the spreadsheet.
Before: Member of the Finance Society. After: Organised the Finance Society's autumn careers panel; booked four speakers and filled 90 of 100 seats.
Before: Dissertation in progress. After: Writing a dissertation on tenant rights in student housing, based on 25 interviews I recruited, ran, and coded myself.
Before: Part-time restaurant work. After: Waited tables on 20-cover Friday shifts for 14 months; given closing keyholder responsibility after six.
If a bullet has no number, ask what you could count: people, responses, hours, weeks, a percentage, a grade. One of those is almost always available.
Mistakes that sink student CVs
- Going to two pages. Keep it to one. You have a few years of material at most, and a second page usually means the first one was not edited.
- Listing every module. Pick the three or four relevant to this application and leave the rest to your transcript.
- Getting the grade decision wrong. Include your average when it helps: a 2:1 or first in the UK, roughly a 3.5+ GPA in the US. If it is lower, leave it off and let projects do the talking, but prepare an honest answer for interviews.
- Burying projects under an irrelevant job. If your strongest evidence is a course project, it goes above the supermarket job, even when the job is more recent.
- A decorative template that machines cannot read. Around 75% of mid-size and large employers screen with ATS software, another widely cited industry figure, and graphics-heavy student templates are exactly what trips it. Start from an ATS-friendly resume template and run the finished PDF through a free ATS resume checker that does real text extraction before you send anything.
FAQ
What should a student CV include if I have no work experience?
A student CV with no work experience should lead with education and projects: your degree, expected graduation date, three or four relevant modules, then course projects, your thesis or dissertation topic, society roles, hackathons, tutoring, and volunteering. Write each one with a concrete scale and outcome, the way you would describe a job. Recruiters reading student CVs expect education to be the main section, so this structure looks normal rather than thin.
How long should a student CV be?
One page. A student rarely has more than a few years of relevant material, and recruiters spend roughly seven seconds on a first scan, so a second page mostly dilutes the first. If you are fighting for space, cut school-level achievements and long module lists before you cut project detail.
Should I put my grades on a student CV?
Include your grade average when it works in your favour: a 2:1 or first in the UK system, or roughly a 3.5+ GPA in the US. If your average is lower, leave it off the CV and put the weight on projects, but prepare a short honest answer for interviews, because the question usually comes up. Individual module grades are worth listing only when one is unusually strong and directly relevant to the role.
Is a student CV different from a student resume?
For students the difference is mostly vocabulary: "CV" in the UK and most of Europe, "resume" in the US and Canada, and the one-page student document is the same in both. The exception is the academic CV used for research and PhD applications, which runs longer and lists publications and conference talks. For internships, placements, and part-time jobs, write the one-page version.
