How to list projects on a resume.

Penn Career Services recommends projects as a way to show technical skills in use, especially for software and computer science candidates. Its broader resume guidance also emphasizes relevance: the section belongs when the work helps communicate a qualification for the actual opportunity, not simply because a project exists.

Projects are not limited to software. A relevant research study, design, event, campaign, process improvement, lab investigation, publication, community initiative, analysis, or fabrication project can provide evidence. The section name should fit the work and field.

High school applicants can use the student resume guide to place class and personal projects beside education, activities, work, and service without changing their context.

Undergraduates can use the college student resume guide to balance projects with research, internships, coursework, campus work, and degree status.

A project may have taken months and still be weak evidence for a particular job. Start with the posting, identify its important qualifications, and apply these checks before giving the project resume space.

• +The project demonstrates a required or strongly preferred qualification in the target posting.
• +You can explain your individual decisions, actions, tools, tradeoffs, and contribution in detail.
• +The project produced an artifact, analysis, event, process, finding, test, improvement, or other concrete output.
• +The work is recent or still representative of your current ability and standards.
• +Including it adds evidence that stronger employment, education, or certification entries do not already show.
• +You are allowed to describe the work and share any linked material without exposing confidential or personal information.

Use the resume keyword guide to identify relevant tools, responsibilities, and context. Match only language that accurately describes the project you performed.

A project title alone does not tell a reviewer whether the work was completed for a class, employer, client, community group, competition, or personal goal. Add that context. For team projects, describe your individual actions and state shared outcomes only when the wording makes the collaboration clear.

If a project was part of paid client services or an independent business, use the freelance work guide to decide whether the engagement belongs in Experience and how to protect client details.

Do not inflate a tutorial, copied walkthrough, or lightly modified starter project into original design work. Explain what source material you used and what you independently changed, tested, decided, or delivered.

Every project, organization, dataset, team, number, and result below is fictional. Use the structure to examine your work; do not copy the facts into your resume.

Use the resume bullet point guide to move from a project description to precise actions, context, and supported outcomes.

Penn notes that projects can support a portfolio or GitHub link. A link helps only when the reviewer can open it, understand what they are seeing, and distinguish your contribution. The resume entry must still communicate useful evidence without a click.

• +The URL opens without a school login, expiring token, local file path, or permission request.
• +The landing page identifies the project, your contribution, and enough context for a reviewer to navigate it.
• +The repository or portfolio contains no secrets, credentials, private records, client data, student data, or material you lack permission to publish.
• +A README, caption, case study, or short description explains how to run, view, or interpret the artifact.
• +The visible work reflects your current standards; abandoned experiments and broken demos are removed or clearly labeled.
• +The link text is readable and the resume still makes sense if a reviewer never opens it.

Never publish employer code, client work, school records, access tokens, credentials, private datasets, or personal information to create a portfolio sample. Build a separate demonstration with permitted or synthetic data when necessary, and label it accurately.

Penn and Berkeley both point early-career candidates toward coursework, school projects, activities, volunteering, and personal projects when professional experience is limited. Keep those headings honest while giving relevant work enough detail to demonstrate capability.

Use the no-experience resume guide to order the complete document, the volunteer work guide to decide when service belongs in Experience instead of Projects, then use the education section guide to decide whether a course-linked project belongs under Education or in its own section.

If the project produced a paper, poster, talk, or proceeding, use the publications and presentations guide to preserve the author record, status, venue, and presentation role.

• +Every project is relevant to the target and adds evidence rather than filling space.
• +The heading names the setting accurately and does not present class, volunteer, or personal work as paid employment.
• +Team statements distinguish your contribution from what collaborators delivered.
• +Every date, tool, method, number, user claim, test, output, and result is accurate and supportable.
• +The strongest action and output appear early; internal shorthand and generic adjectives are removed.
• +Links are accessible, safe to share, presentable, and optional to understanding the resume entry.
• +Project entries use the same readable typography, dates, bullets, and spacing as the rest of the resume.

Place the final section in the free ATS resume template, keep its layout readable with the ATS-friendly resume format guide, and open every link from the exported file before applying.