A graduate CV has one job: get you to an interview. It is not a biography and it is not a complete record. Every line either helps that job or takes space from a line that would.
Here is a structure that works, and the reasoning behind each choice.
One page
Not as a rule of etiquette — as a forcing function. One page makes you choose, and the act of choosing is what turns a list into an argument. If you cannot fit it, you have not decided what matters yet.
The order
- Name and contact. Two lines. Email, phone, city, and one link — portfolio, repository or professional profile. Not three links.
- A two-line summary. What you are, what you are looking for. Skip the adjectives; “hard-working and passionate” describes every applicant and distinguishes none.
- Education. Degree, institution, dates, and your result. Include your CGPA if it is good; calculate it properly with a CGPA calculator and report the exact figure with its scale.
- Projects or experience — whichever is stronger. Two to four entries with real bullets.
- Skills. Specific and honest.
- Everything else. One short line if it earns its place.
Writing bullets that work
The pattern is: what you did, how you did it, what changed.
Weak: “Responsible for the college technical society’s social media.”
Strong: “Ran the technical society’s social media for a year; moved from irregular posting to a weekly schedule and grew the following from 400 to 2,100.”
The second version is better not because it is longer but because it contains facts. Numbers are the cheapest credibility available to you, and student work is full of them if you look: participants, hours, percentage improvement, size of dataset, number of users.
If a genuine number does not exist, describe scope instead: “for a 60-person cohort”, “across six modules”. Never invent one.
What to cut
- Your photo, age, marital status and address. Irrelevant, and in some markets actively unhelpful.
- “References available on request.” Assumed. It wastes a line.
- Secondary school results, once you have a degree — unless the employer specifically asks for them.
- Skill rating bars. A bar saying you are at 80 percent in Python means nothing to a reader and nothing to you.
- Hobbies that are true of everyone. Reading, music, travelling. Keep a hobby only if it is specific enough to be a conversation.
- An objective that is about what you want. Rewrite it as what you offer.
Projects are your experience
With no full-time roles, projects carry the CV. What makes a project entry credible is not ambition but completion and specificity. A small, finished, working thing with a link beats an ambitious description of something that does not run.
For each project, answer three questions in the bullets: what problem it solved, what you personally built, and what the outcome was. On a group project, be precise about your part. Interviewers ask, and vagueness looks like a claim you cannot support.
Tailoring without rewriting
Keep one master document with everything. For each application, cut it down and reorder, so the most relevant experience sits highest. Mirror the vocabulary in the job advert where it is honest to do so — if they say “data pipelines” and you built one, use their phrase rather than yours.
Fifteen minutes per application, not two hours. The gain comes from relevance and ordering, not from rewriting prose.
Before you send it
Read it aloud. Anything you would not say out loud to a person does not belong in it. Then have someone else read it and ask them what job they think you are applying for. If they cannot tell within ten seconds, the top third of the page needs work.