When you are interviewing for an IT job, you need to be able to tell the interviewer how you have prepared yourself for the internship or full-time position. I often get a chance to review students resume. I don’t claim to be the best person writing a resume, but the students do not make themselves sound interesting. Do you have talking points that are interesting? Your resume does not have to elaborate everything about a particular experience. It just needs to be interesting enough to entice the eyes of the interviewer to ask you more about that particular experience.
I would suggest after your sophomore year, you start and continue to build your resume. If at the beginning of your junior year and you have not added anything interesting to your resume, then you have to reflect and ask yourself what did you do this past year? Have you acquired any new technology skills? If so, indicate not just the computer skills, but how the skills are effectively used in a business setting or in decision-making.
That is why when you work on a real project for a client, it helps in building a talking point in your resume. The harder and less trivial the project, the more you can engage in a lively conversation with the recruiter. Your hard work in a project has unexpectedly more lasting effects than a simple trivial one that your team sets out to do originally. Therefore, it is important that you challenge yourself in any project. Again, recruiters are always looking for whether you are doing just the vanilla to get a passing grade or you push and venture yourself into uncharted territories, failing several times along the way but in the end, the project completed exceeded the objectives and your expectations.
What and how do you exactly write this experience on the resume? An excellent place to start is to examine the syllabus of the course. There will be methodologies and business terms included in the course objective that you can use to describe the project objectives, outcome and success factors. And be prepared to answer questions of what you learn about yourself throughout the project.
