An attention-grabbing resume is an important tool high schoolers can use for everything from securing an internship to landing a job to winning a scholarship. A high school resume shares the same intent as those used by professionals in the workforce: it highlights your education, experiences, and skills to provide the reader a clear picture of who you are—sparking an interest to learn more about you and why you’re right for the opportunity. Keep reading to learn how to craft a winning high school resume and for a high resume template to get you started.
The Importance of a High School Resume
You’ll use a resume throughout your life, whether applying for a high school internship or a professional position. As a professional, a resume plays an outsized role in determining whether a company will choose to interview you or not. As a high schooler, a resume can also help you land a job or internship, but you may need a polished resume for a handful of other situations as well. For instance, many college and scholarship applications require you to submit a resume.
As a high schooler, you may have limited, or no, work experience. However, a resume is still a valuable tool for conveying your skills, education, and achievements. A polished resume can help you stand out from a competitive field of applicants—whether for a select spot at your dream school, a coveted scholarship, or an impressive internship. In other words, having a detailed, properly formatted, and up-to-date resume is incredibly important.
Elements of a Successful High School Resume
Everyone’s high school resume is unique, as it highlights their own personal education, experiences, and skills. However, the elements, characteristics, and template of a strong high school resume are universal. For example, powerful resumes are:
Succinct: Many employers spend just seconds reviewing a resume, meaning you have just moments to capture their interest. The best resumes are one page long at most and carefully crafted to highlight your best attributes.
Emphasize accomplishments: A high school resume is more than merely a list of the classes you’ve taken, clubs you belong to, and places you volunteered—rather, it’s a highlight reel of your achievements. Use specifics to shine a spotlight on your successes. For example, President of the Model UN isn’t nearly as eye-catching as Increased student participation by 25% as President of the Model UN or Led my team to a Best Delegation Award as President of the Model UN.
Highlight skills: There are a variety of skills you’ve built in high school and through other experiences that are transferable to the workplace. Abilities like teamwork, communication, organization, motivation, adaptability, creativity, resourcefulness, and work ethic are all examples of appealing attributes that look good on a high school resume.
Ultimately, the best resumes are a page long, follow the same high school resume template, and are carefully crafted to highlight your best characteristics.
High School Resume Template
Getting started writing a high school resume can feel daunting, however, it’s much easier when you break it down into smaller parts. StandOut Connect’s high school resume template consists of five parts:
Header
Education
Experience
Leadership and Activities
Skills and Interests
While it’s okay to work on the sections of our high school resume template individually, your resume must paint a comprehensive picture of yourself—highlighting the experiences, skills, and accomplishments that are most relevant to what you’re applying for.
Anatomy of Our High School Resume Template
Most high schoolers share a similar structure of classes, experiences, and skills (and possess a less robust work history than their professional counterparts); consequently, it’s typical that students follow the same template when building their high school resume. Below is a tried-and-true high school resume format.
Keep in mind, because most high school resumes follow the same template, it’s critical that the content of your resume shines.
Header
The header is home to your name and contact information. At a minimum, the header should include your name, email address, and phone number. If you have a LinkedIn profile, it’s common to also include it in the header. It isn’t necessary to include your physical address on a resume, but it can be helpful to include if you’re local, as it shows potential managers, mentors, and internship coordinators that you won’t require special considerations getting to and from the position.
Remember you’re sharing this information in hopes of securing an internship, college admission, or scholarship, so make sure that you’re using a professional-sounding email. If you don’t have one, create one and use it for your work-related endeavors going forward. Some basic rules for creating a professional email include using your professional name (no nicknames) and avoiding the use of numbers and characters. If you need to make your email address unique, stick to periods and underscores, but use them sparingly.
All that said, you should avoid the inclusion of any personal information you’re uncomfortable sharing.
Education
As its name implies, the education section is the place to share the high school or schools you’ve attended and your intended graduation date. Your resume is a marketing tool—its aim is to set you apart from the competition—and it’s okay to brag. Make sure to include any academic honors or awards you’ve won, your impressively high class rank (in the top 20% of your class), your sterling GPA (include anything over a 3.5), jaw-dropping SAT/ACT score, or challenging coursework you’ve completed, particularly if it’s relevant to the internship or scholarship you’re using the resume to apply for.
Touting your achievements is great, but don’t exaggerate or bend the truth. First and foremost, it’s unethical. Also, professionals are adept at spotting inconsistencies on resumes, and there can be serious consequences for being dishonest on your high school resume.
Experience
The experience section is where you highlight your work experience, both paid and volunteer. Your work experience can include everything from part-time and summer jobs like lawn mowing, babysitting, or cashiering to interning on a research project to charity work such as volunteering at the food bank or helping out at the local animal shelter.
List your experiences in reverse chronological order—that is, from the newest to the oldest—including the name of the organization, its location, and the dates you worked. Also, highlight noteworthy achievements, responsibilities, and skills—especially if they’re relevant to what you’re applying for. Use specifics and avoid cliches and overused and meaningless buzzwords. For example, you’re not a go-getter; rather, you Organized a Home for the Holidays Adoption Event that connected 15 pets from your local shelter with new families.
Leadership and Activities
This is the spot in our high school resume template to add any significant activities that have not been previously mentioned. They can include activities like participation in student government, clubs, athletics, or music. The inclusion of extracurricular activities on your high school resume demonstrates your interests outside of the classroom and shows you can manage your time and prioritize activities. It also exhibits skills such as leadership, teamwork, and commitment.
Like other places in your resume, make sure to highlight your achievements and accomplishments. If you’re the student body president, captain of the football team, or star of the school play, make sure to call it out!
Skills and Interests
The skills section of a high school resume is home to any abilities or expertise you may have. Skills are divided into hard skills and soft skills. A hard skill is a technical ability you’ve gained from education, training, or practice. For example, you can speak another language, know how to code, are a whiz with Excel, or a social media star. Great ways to show off your hard skills include linking to a website you’ve created or to a portfolio showcasing your creative writing, articles published in the school paper, or art.
Soft skills are personal attributes and behaviors like communication, listening, relationship building, and working within a team. Although teamwork might not sound as impressive as being fluent in Java, consider it’s a lot easier to teach someone how to code than it is to work well with others. In general, aim for a balance of soft and hard skills on your resume.
If your resume is a little light and you have room, you can also include a list of interests. Who knows, maybe you and the person reading your resume share a passion for cooking, skiing, or reading. You never know what will grab the attention of a resume reader.
Resume Writing Tips
The template above provides the structure of a successful high school resume, but the content is what wins over readers. Below are a few tips for writing a resume that will earn you interviews.
Keep it short: Limit your resume to one page, focusing on why you’re the right person for the job, internship, scholarship, or admission.
Stay on point: Use clear and direct language when describing your accomplishments.
Go for simplicity: You want the content of your resume to stand out, not your formatting—avoid using high school resume templates with too many distracting colors, images, or strange fonts. You can’t go wrong with black and gray and professional fonts like Arial and Times New Roman.
Make it scannable: Divide information into sections and use clear headings and bullets to make information easily consumable.
Best bullet practices: Never begin a bullet with “I”; rather, begin bullets with action verbs.
Format for success: Save your resume in a Word document, PDF, and a Google doc and send it in the requested format.
Proofread: Your resume should be perfect—that means no spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, tense confusion, or typos. Proofread your resume multiple times and have someone else review it if possible.
Keeping it short and simple is a solid strategy when writing your high school resume. While it’s tempting to include every award you’ve won or extracurricular activity you’ve participated in, they can draw a reader’s attention away from your most impactful achievements. For example, listing that you played in the Jazz Band freshman year is a lot less impactful than if you played it in all four years. It’s a smart strategy to focus on the experiences and activities that you’ve participated in the longest.
Readers often only spend seconds looking at a resume, and you want them to focus on your most relevant and impressive accomplishments.
The Benefits of Having a Good Resume
The most obvious advantage of having a strong resume is that it will increase your odds of getting whatever you’re applying for. More than merely a summary of your experiences, skills, and achievements, a strong resume is an advertisement for you that piques the interest of readers. In other words, it makes them want to learn more about you—putting you in the possible pile and keeping you out of the pass pile.
Developing a good high school resume will also save you time down the road. As mentioned above, you’ll need a resume for everything from college admission and scholarships to internships and jobs. A resume is a living document and once you’ve perfected it, you just need to keep it up to date and tweak it when applying for specific things—adding and subtracting relevant experiences, skills, and achievements as you progress through your academic and professional career.
StandOut Connect
Are you a high school student eager to gain hands-on experience in your dream field? StandOut Connect is your gateway to transformative online internships—connecting gifted students like you with top university alumni who are leaders and innovators in fields like finance, STEM, medicine, psychology, law, and the arts. Click the button in the top right corner of our website to unlock amazing internship opportunities for high school students and get a headstart on a successful college and professional career.