One-Page Resume Rules for Internships and New Grad Roles

Why one page for early-career resumes?

Recruiters reviewing internship and new grad applications often look at a large number of resumes in a short time. With only a few years of school and a small amount of work history, one page is enough to show your best work, and it shows that you can prioritize. A second page of weaker material usually dilutes the strong material on the first.

The rule is a convention, not a law. If you are applying for a research position, or you have a long list of publications, a longer document may be appropriate. For most students applying to software, business, analytics or design roles, one page is the expectation.

What order should the sections go in?

Put your strongest evidence near the top. For most students that means:

• Header: name, email, phone, city and state, LinkedIn, and GitHub or portfolio link.
• Education: school, degree, expected graduation month and year, GPA if it is strong, and a short list of relevant coursework.
• Experience: internships, part-time jobs, research, teaching assistant roles.
• Projects: two to four projects with the technology used and a result.
• Skills: languages, frameworks and tools, grouped by category.
• Leadership and awards: club roles, hackathons, scholarships, volunteering.

What should I cut to fit on one page?

Start by removing content that does not help for this application. Older high school activities, unrelated part-time jobs from years ago, and skills you barely use are the first to go. Then merge or shorten: a project with three bullets can often become two, and a bullet that wraps onto a second line for a single word can usually be tightened.

• Delete the objective statement; the top of the resume already shows what you want.
• Drop "References available upon request".
• Remove basic skills everyone has, such as Microsoft Word, unless the job asks for it.
• Keep each bullet to one or two lines.
• Limit each entry to about three bullets, with the most relevant first.

What margins and fonts are reasonable?

Avoid shrinking the text below about 10 points to squeeze in more content, because a dense page is harder to read. Margins between roughly half an inch and one inch keep the page balanced. Choose a common, legible font, use bold and small caps sparingly for headings, and keep the spacing consistent from one section to the next. If you have to change the font size to make it fit, cut content instead.

How do I write strong bullets in limited space?

Use the pattern of action verb, what you did, how, and the result. Numbers make a bullet concrete, but only use figures you can back up. If you do not have a metric, describe the scope honestly, such as the size of the team, the number of users or the technology involved.

• Built a course-planning web app in React and Node.js used by 300 students in the department.
• Reduced report generation time from 12 minutes to 3 by rewriting the SQL queries.
• Led a team of four in a 24-hour hackathon and shipped a working demo.

How do I check the final PDF?

Export the resume as a PDF and view it at full size. Make sure nothing spills onto a second page, no heading is stranded at the bottom of the page, and every link is clickable. Select and copy the text to confirm it is real text rather than an image, which also helps applicant tracking systems read it. Finally, read it aloud once for typos, and ask a friend or career center advisor to look it over.