What Belongs on an Engineering Fresher's CV

A fresher CV is not a biography. It is a filtering document read quickly by someone with many of them, and its only job is to get you into the room. That purpose should decide everything on the page.

One page

You have a degree, some projects and perhaps an internship. That fits on one page. A two-page fresher CV signals padding, and padding is read as a lack of judgement.

What earns space

• Projects, with what the problem was, what you built, what you used, and the outcome. This is the most important section and should be the longest.
• Internships, with what you actually did rather than the organisation's description of itself.
• Technical skills, honestly graded. Anything listed is fair game in an interview.
• Education with marks, since eligibility is checked against them.
• Positions of responsibility where you ran something with a real outcome.

What to remove

• An objective statement. It says nothing and occupies the most valuable space on the page.
• Declarations, signatures, dates, father's name, photographs unless specifically asked for.
• School details beyond marks, once you have degree results.
• Hobbies, unless genuinely distinctive and relevant.
• Any skill you could not defend for five minutes.

How to write a project entry

Lead with the problem, not the technology. 'Built a system to detect early cracking in concrete beams using sensor data' is stronger than 'Python, machine learning project'. The technology belongs at the end of the entry, because an interviewer wants to know what you were trying to do before they care what you used.

The honesty rule

Everything on the page is an invitation to be questioned. Listing a technology you touched once will be found out in the technical round, and it damages everything else you claimed. A shorter honest CV outperforms a longer padded one every time.