Internships and co-ops are great ways to learn and to help you pad your resume a little bit before you start looking for jobs after graduation. When I was a in college I wanted to do an internship desperately so that I would be in a better position once I hit the job market. It worked out pretty well for me as my internship lead to a part time job which lead to a full time job the day after I graduated.
Now I'm on the other side of the table and I've gone through a couple of cycles of co-op candidates at work and look across at a series of young hopefuls who also seek to pad their own resume's.
I go through dozens of resumes each cycle for students who are seeking employment in the development field for the first time and have found a few things happen repeatedly that make me either put your name into the "NO" pile instantly or very politely cut our interview short.
Hopefully potential first time interns / co-ops with limited experience will benefit from this.
I don't care about the alphabet soup, just show me what you did I don't care how many abbreviations you can cram onto your resume as it all ends up meaning nothing. Sometime ago I found someone who had every exciting language and technology possible on their resume. I got excited, I wanted to interview and talk to this kid. He was also the owner of his own company. I thought: "Wow! This kid is going to shine and would be a great addition to our team! He'll hop aboard and just start getting stuff done at once."
Then I looked closer at his resume. He listed all of these technologies but then had no details about anything he did with any of them. I looked at the website for his "company" and every line made me cringe. It was like reading the greatest hits of every cringe worthy start-up. The site had page after page of nothing. At the end I had no idea what the company was about, no idea what was being worked on, no idea that it was anything more than a generic template that was just filled with words.
Add a few key technologies that you worked with, but then tell me exactly what you did. Give me a quick overview of some cool, interesting or fun things you have accomplished using technology. Even if the tech stack you've worked with doesn't match what I'm looking for exactly I'll consider your resume more than the person that just lists every technology available.
Don't mention jobs that aren't relevant to the software development field Student careers centers are partly to blame for this. I went to one once and they asked me to list every place I ever worked for. They then proceeded to make me put this on a resume that I hoped to use to apply for a development position. Don't do this.
Please don't list that you worked at Hollister and advised customers on what clothes looked good to them or that you were a cashier and handled up to $200 cash. I will feel like I wasted my time reading that as it tells me nothing about your ability to write an if statement.
Even if you don't have much experience, just mention a small project you worked on in class, mention some of the highlights of what you did with it. In the interview we'll go over those class projects in detail to see what you understood from it.
Extracurricular activities are cool and fun, but don't go overboard with them
I get that most students looking for their first job don't have much experience but I really don't care that you planted 300 trees one summer, or that you attempted to get a bill to pass to ban plastic bottles or that you went to bible school.
Extracurricular activities are a nice extra to get to know a little bit about a student, but please keep it brief and don't go overboard with listing every club you were part of since high school.
Don't list tools that you use to code Visual Studio, Notepad++, Sublime, vim, XCode. What do all of these items have in common?
They have no place on your resume.
They are tools that you use to write code and tell me nothing about you and your skill. It is space wasted that you could have used to go into detail about something that you worked on to give me a better insight into your skill set. I personally don't care what you use to write code in. I might raise an eyebrow if you use Notepad to write your code, but apart from that I don't really care what you write code in. If you want to use MS Word with a series of plugins to make it highlight JavaScript then be my guest. As long as your code works and is clean I won't mind.
Don't even get me started on listing Word, Excel, Chrome/ Firefox as skills. Please just stop.