Most internship CVs fail for the same reason: they try to look like a senior professional's CV, just emptier. A recruiter reading an internship application is not expecting ten years of jobs. They are looking for evidence that you can learn fast, show up, and care about the work. That changes what belongs on the page.
Lead with what you actually have
If you have little or no paid experience, your education section moves to the top. Not a single line with a degree name, but the parts that signal capability: relevant coursework, a final-year project, a thesis topic, grades if they help you. A computer science student applying for a dev internship should list the project where they built something real, with a sentence on what it did and what stack they used.
Group the rest into honest sections. Part-time jobs count, even unrelated ones. Waiting tables teaches you to handle pressure and difficult customers, and a recruiter knows that. Volunteer work, student club roles, a side project you actually finished. These are not filler. They are proof you do things without being told to.
Write bullets about outcomes, not duties
The weakest CV bullet describes a responsibility. "Responsible for managing the club's social media" tells me nothing. What happened? Did the follower count grow? Did an event sell out because of your posts? Numbers help, even small ones. "Ran the photography club's Instagram, grew it from 40 to 300 followers in a semester" is specific and believable.
For an internship, you will not have big professional numbers. That is fine. Use what you have from school and side projects. A 20-person group project where you handled the final presentation is a real story. Tell it in one tight line.
Keep it to one page
An internship CV that runs to two pages reads as padding. One page forces you to choose, and choosing is the skill recruiters are checking for. Cut the objective statement at the top, it wastes the most valuable space on the page saying nothing. If you want a short summary, make it two lines that name the field you want to work in and one concrete strength.
Match the posting, do not spray and pray
Read the internship description and mirror its language. If it asks for someone comfortable with data, and you cleaned a messy dataset for a class project, that goes near the top. Tailoring a CV per application sounds like a lot of work, but for an internship you are usually applying to a handful of places you actually want, so it is worth the half hour each.
If you build your CV from a LinkedIn profile, a tool like Postulit can turn your profile into a clean, ATS-readable layout so you spend your time on the wording, not the formatting.
Before you send it
Proofread it twice, then have one other person read it. Typos on an internship CV read louder than on a senior one, because the writing is most of what you are being judged on. Save it as a PDF named with your actual name, not "cv final v3". Small thing, but it is the first impression the file makes before anyone opens it.