core Estimated learning time: 6 h

GR-1.7 Resume and portfolio

You have a one-page resume a recruiter understands in ninety seconds, a profile that points at real work, and one finished project anyone can open and run.

A resume is read for ten seconds before it is read at all, so it is a document about what you did, in numbers, on one page, with nothing invented. The portfolio is the proof behind it: one project that runs, with a README a stranger can follow. Purdue's writing lab and MIT's career office teach the document, the IIT Roorkee lectures cover the campus context, and the machine-learning version of all this lives in the AI/ML capstone module and is offered from there rather than repeated here.

Work through these

Read the resume sections guide and list which sections you can honestly fill today
The sections a resume can have, and what each is for. The honest list is usually shorter than the template, and a short honest page beats a long padded one every time.
Purdue OWL: Resumes and CVs · Reference
Read the first college resume guide and draft one page from it
Written for a student with no work history, which is most people reading this. It shows where coursework, projects and labs go when there is no job to list, and how to write them.
MIT CAPD: Preparing your first college resume · Reference
Watch the IIT Roorkee lectures on drafting an effective resume
The same document from the side of an Indian campus placement, where the format expectations differ a little and the reader has less time. Watch it after the draft, not before.
NPTEL: Soft Skills · Course
Rewrite every line as an action with a number: what you built, how big it was, what changed
The edit that does the most work. A line that says what you were responsible for reads as nothing; a line that says what you built and what it measured reads as evidence.
Read the applicant-tracking note and remove anything a parser cannot read: tables, columns, icons
Most large employers run resumes through software before a person sees them, and two-column layouts come out scrambled. Plain text in one column is the format that survives.
MIT CAPD: Make your resume ATS-friendly · Reference
Put one finished project online with a README a stranger can follow to run it
The proof behind the page. One project that runs, with instructions somebody else can follow, is worth more than five listed by name, and it is what a recruiter opens first.
Have two people read the page for ninety seconds and tell you what you did; fix whatever they missed
The only test that matters, run before anybody who can hire you runs it. What two readers cannot say back after ninety seconds is what the page is failing to say.

Free resources

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Links last checked 2 Sept 2026.

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