Do I add volunteering work to my resume?
I graduated in January 2024 with a Masters in CS and am still looking for my first full time job. I've been doing an unpaid Frontend internship since march and have been volunteering as a Software Engineer (C# and Unity) during my spare time at a local university. Can I include either or both of these experiences to the Work Experience section in my resume? Will having two current work experiences be a red flag? Is it better to remove the Lab work because it isn't directly related to what I want to work on in the future (Full stack web dev)?
![Senior Software Engineer [E5] at Meta company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Fmeta.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Da7a5bcc0-e178-4b5b-b71e-09bf6c6aefae&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
![Entry-Level Software Engineer [L3] at Google company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Fgoogle.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D780356ef-3efc-4728-9eb4-d909b75bb4a6&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
Discussion
(6 comments)- 16 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
Yes, definitely add the internship to your work experience!
I would probably put the lab work under a "Projects" section of your resume. There's more latitude to work on random technologies and ideas for side projects.
- 06 months agoSoftware Engineering Intern [OP]Taro Community
Thanks Rahul! Will give this a try!
- 0
6 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroThe internship should go into work experience for sure. It's not a big deal that it's unpaid (and people won't ask during the interview).
The lab work is interesting as it's game development, and it doesn't fit neatly into either projects or work experience. I think we can use this ambiguity to our advantage. Similar to what I mention in the resume course about projects, the thing that matters is number of users:
- If the volunteering project has many users (and is therefore impressive), I would put it underneath work experience to bump it up
- If the project hasn't really gone anywhere, you can put it in the Projects section to not distract your overall resume
- 06 months agoSoftware Engineering Intern [OP]Taro Community
Thanks for the reply Alex! I don't really know how many users makes a game impressive, This game had 100 research participants (users) and was built to study brain signals for a research study (so it was not publicly deployed or released).
- 06 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
100 users is not bad. If you can throw in more numbers (e.g. "500+ tests run across the ~100 users), that will make it more impressive. It seems like there was some real impact there, so you could try having it on work experience.
If you really want to find out, make 2 resumes and A/B test them (apply to 50 jobs each and track conversion rate). Otherwise, I would just put it in work experience as interns tend to have very anemic experience sections.
- 06 months agoSoftware Engineering Intern [OP]Taro Community
Will do. Thanks again Alex!
