Tips for interns on how to pimp your online resume.

I've come to realize that academia is world unto itself. I have so little time to get to all my assigned weekly readings that I've developed a newfound respect for my professors who have to correct assignments, keep up with the latest research and do their own research! All that to say that academia is the reason I'm finally getting around to writing a post at 3 a.m.

Something else that's been taking up my time is updating my online resume at Visual CV. Visual CV is a website I learned of via one of my Twitter peeps. For a while I've been searching for an easy to use and easy on the eyes online portfolio and I think I may have found it. Visual CV allows users to upload basically anything they've ever worked on including video, podcasts, powerpoint presentations and more (Check out President Obama's visual CV in the pic). I've spent the last few days pulling together some of the writing samples and marketing pieces that I've worked on and uploading them to my visual cv. You can see it here: www.visualcv.com/khailaedward. It's still a work in progress. But as I've been doing this, it has become apparent that I may have missed many good opportunities to collect the things I worked on at my internships. So below are a few things I wish I had done at ALL my internships.

• Ask for a letter of recommendation. This is becoming increasingly important with social media sites like LinkedIn and now Visual CV. Now you can take excerpts from those letters and use them in your social media profiles. Also, if you need an excuse to reach out to someone who provided you with a recommendation but who you've been neglecting, you can send them a link to your online resume letting them know that you included quotes from their letter.
• Keep a journal of what you did. Ideally you should do this at the end of every day but if you can't, then at least every week. We do so much in one work week that at the end of an internship it's hard to identify everything worked on.
• Keep copies of any non-proprietary work. Please don't go taking documents from an internship that are clearly not for outside circulation, but once you've worked on it and it's fairly public or non-objectionable then try to obtain an electronic version of it. If in doubt, definitely ask your supervisor. If you can't get your hands on an electronic version before you leave, then get the hard copy, you can always scan it into your PC at a later date. For PR interns this is really important when you've pitched a story that's gotten press.
• An addendum to the last point. As a PR intern I got several great broadcast news hits for stories I'd pitched which I now wish I had as video to upload to my online resumes. At the end of an internship you should request a CD with any broadcast clips you may have gotten (most agencies have services which monitor these). If that fails, you can always TiVo! :-)

So what's worth including in your online portfolio you're asking? Well it goes without saying that it should be what you consider your best work. But if you're a student with little experience or a younger student, then you can get really creative. If you worked on an Excel spreadsheet for the first time, then use the file itself in your online portfolio OR you can take a screenshot and go into more detail about what you did with Excel in the comments sections many of these websites have. Although I prefer not to use self-photos in my online resumes, you can use photos creatively and conservatively if you feel the need to or if you really have little else. If you work an event for example, you can have someone take action shots of you performing a task which you can explain in the visual CV. But be conservative. These are just a few things I thought of while working on my visual CV, hopefully it helps some intern out there to stand out in the crowd. Are there any other things an intern can take away from the job which can be used in an online resume?