Where the evidence actually is
- Coursework and academic projects — a real project with a real outcome counts, even if it was for a grade.
- Part-time, retail, food service, or gig work — every one of these involved responsibility, a schedule, and usually some result you can name.
- Clubs, teams, and volunteering — organizing anything, leading anyone, or hitting a target counts the same way a job would.
Stop looking for "experience." Look for evidence.
"Experience" sounds like it means a job title. It doesn't, not to the résumé — what a résumé actually needs is evidence that you can do the thing the job asks for. A class project where you built something, a semester where you ran a club's budget, a summer where you trained new hires at a retail job — all of that is evidence of exactly the things employers screen for: can you finish something, can you work with people, can you own a result.
The mistake isn't a thin work history. The mistake is treating the résumé as a list of job titles instead of a list of things you can prove you did.
Turn a non-job into a real bullet
The formula doesn't change just because the context isn't a corporate job: what you did, at what scale, with what result. Two examples, same structure, neither one a paying job:
Class project
"Built a scheduling app for a database course; team of 4, presented to 30 classmates, used SQL and a basic web frontend."
Part-time retail
"Trained 5 new hires on POS and inventory procedure; covered closing shifts solo during peak season without an error in the nightly count."
Neither of those needed a job title to be real. Both name a scale (4 people, 30 classmates, 5 hires) and a result (presented it, zero errors) instead of just naming a task.
Where a first résumé actually goes wrong
- An objective statement instead of a project. "Seeking an entry-level position to grow my skills" tells a reader nothing about you. A bullet about a real project tells them what you can already do.
- Listing responsibilities instead of what came of them. "Member of the coding club" is a fact. "Placed 2nd of 14 teams in the coding club's hackathon" is evidence.
- Skills with nothing behind them. A list of tools with no project or class attached to any of them reads as a list you copied from a job posting, not a list of things you've used.
Build a first résumé in the Studio
An ATS-safe outline with the sections that actually matter first — no objective statement, no filler.