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Most college forms do not ask you to upload a resume. They ask you to type your school years into boxes: short activity slots for US colleges, longer descriptions for some Indian universities, a written statement for the UK. A one-page resume is the master file you copy from, and it is also what you email for internships, summer programmes and scholarships.
What should a school student's resume include?
Use five sections, in this order, and list the items in each with the most recent first. Harvard's career office advises reverse chronological order, no personal pronouns, and no photo, age or gender on a resume.
Education: school, board (CBSE, ICSE, state board, IB), years, and your Class 10 result. Add Class 11 and 12 marks or predicted grades once you have them.
Activities: clubs, sports, music, volunteering, a job, family responsibilities. Give your role, the organisation, the dates and one line on what you did.
Projects: a science fair entry, an app, a research write-up, an Atal Tinkering Lab build.
Awards: the name, the level (school, district, state, national, international) and the year. Olympiad stages count.
Skills: languages with your level, software, programming languages, lab techniques. Skip words like 'hard-working'; your bullets should show that.
At the top go your name, email, phone number and city. Keep the photo and date of birth off the page. Forms that need them collect them separately: Ashoka University's 2026 form has its own fields for a student photo and date of birth.
How do you write activity lines that admissions officers can read fast?
Use one pattern for every line: action verb, what you did, how big it was, what changed. Common App's own guide shows how to trim a 256-character volunteer description to 141 characters that still give the important details. The same guide asks applicants to think about family responsibilities, a job, internships, volunteering, hobbies and sports, so all of these belong on your list.
A worked example, with made-up details:
Before: 'I was a member of the science club and helped with many events.'
After: 'Ran monthly science club quiz; wrote 60 questions; attendance grew from 15 to 40 students.'
Before: 'Did a project on water quality.'
After: 'Tested pH and hardness of 12 borewell samples in my colony; shared results with the residents' association.'
How do you change the same resume for Indian and foreign applications?
Keep the master page, then cut or expand it for each form. Limits from the current official guides:
US colleges on the Common App: you can add up to ten activities, with 50 characters for your position, 100 for the organisation and 150 for the details, plus hours per week and weeks per year, according to Common App's activities guide. Abbreviate and drop full sentences.
Indian universities such as Ashoka: the 2026 form makes three non-academic activities mandatory, each with dates, a level of engagement and a description of up to 100 words, and asks you to combine several certificates for one activity into a single file, preferably a PDF, per Ashoka's application guide. A separate 100-word box covers academic awards, projects, online courses and competitions.
UK universities through UCAS: there is no activity list. The personal statement answers three questions in 4,000 characters, with at least 350 characters per answer, and the third asks what you have done outside education and why it is useful, according to UCAS. Write about the resume lines that fit your course.
Internships, summer schools and scholarships: send the one-page PDF itself.
If you are applying abroad from an Indian board, our guide on how CBSE results work for applying to foreign universities explains how your marks are read.
What should you leave off a student resume?
An 'objective' line; the form already says what you are applying for.
Parents' names, religion, your full address and marks for every unit test.
Every participation certificate. One national-level finalist line says more than a stack of 'participated' lines.
Anything you cannot explain. If a project used physics or chemistry you only half understand, learn it properly before an interviewer asks; the Fermi Concept Library has a lesson for each concept in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing.
For coding projects, link your work; see how to build a GitHub profile as a student. If you plan to use AI to polish your wording, read what colleges say about AI in applications first.
A one-evening plan to build yours
List everything since Class 9: clubs, competitions, projects, jobs, duties at home.
Rank them by the time you gave and what changed because of you. Keep the strongest eight to ten.
Rewrite each one as a single line that starts with a verb.
Fit it to one page in a plain font and save it as a PDF named with your full name.
Ask a teacher or parent to check every date and number.
Copy from it into each form, and update it every term.
