A quick note before the detail: you don't need to have all of this. I read resumes holistically — the overall picture matters far more than any single box. The point of this guide is to help you surface and frame what you've actually got, so nothing valuable gets left off.
Start here: a resume does two jobs
It earns the interview, and then it steers the interview toward your strengths. Keep it to one page, and make every line something you'd happily talk about for five minutes. If you wouldn't want to be asked about it, cut it.
The shape of a strong one
Think of this as the menu, not the mandate. The right order depends on where your strengths are.
- Education — university, degree, majors, graduation year, and your WAM / GPA (don't hide it). Strong secondary-school results can earn a line too.
- Experience — internships and roles with a quantitative, analytical or technical edge. Lead with what you did and achieved, not what you were "responsible for."
- Extracurriculars — competitions, societies, leadership. Initiative shows.
- Projects — technical projects with a real-world point. A good one can outweigh a thin work history.
- Skills — programming languages and tools, listed clearly.
- Interests — yes, really. More on this below.
Bullets: achievements, not duties
"Responsible for the trading society's events" tells me nothing. "Ran a 60-person trading competition and built the P&L scoring in Python" tells me plenty. Every bullet should be achievement-oriented and, wherever you can, put a number on it — a size, a percentage, a ranking, a result.
Interests — the most underrated section
This is where a lot of applications quietly leave signal on the table. Competitive, strategic hobbies are genuinely relevant, because they show how you think.
- Strong signal: poker, chess, competitive maths, speed-cubing, sport at a competitive level, strategy games (Catan, Risk, Blokus), pattern games (GeoGuessr, Wordle) — anything that shows strategy, fast decisions, risk assessment or pattern recognition.
- Weak signal: generic, passive interests — "reading, travelling, Netflix." If that's all that's there, dig deeper; you almost certainly do something more interesting.
And be specific. "Poker — online cash games, ~2 years" beats "cards."
Common things that cost people
- Listing duties instead of achievements
- No numbers anywhere
- More than one page
- Buzzwords with no evidence ("strong leadership skills" — shown how?)
- Photos, colours, graphics, personal statements, references
- Interests too generic to be worth a conversation
Read it holistically — and breathe. You do not need every section here. If across your experience, projects and interests there's enough genuinely interesting, conversation-worthy material, that's what counts. A strong overall picture beats a perfect-but-empty one. The only real dealbreaker is a resume with nothing to talk about.
Now curate it — then apply.
Take twenty minutes, surface the things you didn't think "counted," and send it our way.
Apply to Quanteric → Also worth reading: what I look for in a cover letter →