Accounting Internship Resume: What to Put On It, With Sources

Four sources we read on 21 October 2026 agree on the core of an accounting internship resume — school and graduation date, GPA, hands-on work with numbers, and the tools you can use. They disagree on a few details, and those are worth knowing about before you send anything.

The sources are ThisWayToCPA (the AICPA's student site), a resume checklist and accounting sample from William & Mary, an accounting sample from Towson University, and CPA Alberta's student recruitment tips. Only ThisWayToCPA and CPA Alberta are written for accountants-to-be. The other two are university career offices showing what a good student resume looks like.

Start with education, and include the GPA#

ThisWayToCPA lists the order it expects: contact details, then education (school, degree program, expected graduation date and GPA), then work experience, then activities, leadership, volunteer work and technical skills. William & Mary also puts Education first, with degree, major and a month-and-year graduation date.

On GPA, ThisWayToCPA is direct. Include it, because GPA matters most early in a career and leaving it off may make an employer assume it's low. The Towson sample goes a step further and lists an overall GPA and a major GPA. William & Mary's sample puts a 3.62 on the Education line along with relevant coursework such as Federal Taxation and Auditing and Internal Controls.

Both samples also show the CPA-eligibility line. Towson's reads "Graduating with 150 hours; CPA eligible to sit for CPA exam," and William & Mary's sample has "CPA Eligible: May 20XX." Neither source explains the rules behind it. Check your own state or province's requirements through your school, and put the line in only if it's accurate for you.

Decide whether you need a summary#

This is where the sources split. William & Mary's checklist says a professional summary or objective is typically not necessary on an undergraduate resume. The Towson sample opens with a two-sentence professional summary naming Excel and QuickBooks. And CPA Alberta says to skip the objective but start with a profile statement and a key skills section tailored to the job.

If you do write one, make it concrete — what you've done and which tools you know. ThisWayToCPA lists an objective statement as optional, saying it can clarify your priorities. Our view: a line about what you can already do tells a recruiter more than a line about what you want.

Show accounting work, then show the rest#

For experience, William & Mary's checklist says to start each bullet with a skill-based verb in the past tense, even for a role you still hold, and to avoid "Responsible for" and "Duties included." It asks you to quantify results with numbers, percentages and dollar amounts where you can.

The Towson sample shows what that looks like in accounting terms. One bullet has the student verifying cash positions with Excel, another preparing amortization calculations, another building Power BI dashboards. Its leadership entry names a $2,000 annual budget the student manages as treasurer of a campus chapter of the National Association of Black Accountants. You don't need a Big Four internship to write bullets like that — a club treasurer role or a volunteer tax clinic counts. The Towson sample lists one of each.

Your non-accounting jobs matter too. ThisWayToCPA says not to leave them off and gives the examples of leadership at a camp, teamwork, or handling financial transactions at a restaurant. The Towson sample keeps an assistant manager job at a restaurant, with a bullet about training a team of 10 servers.

Group your technical skills#

Both samples give technical skills their own section. Towson's splits them into two lines: financial and accounting systems (QuickBooks and Sage 50), and data and analytics (Excel, Tableau, Power BI and SQL). William & Mary's sample lists SQL, Python, R, Stata, Adobe Analytics, Looker, Excel and PowerPoint.

Grouping them by purpose is easier to scan than one long run of tool names. Only list what you can actually use on the job — an interviewer can ask.

Formatting and ATS#

William & Mary's checklist asks for one page, a readable font such as Times New Roman, Arial or Calibri, a minimum size of 10 and a maximum of 14 for headers, and at least half-inch margins. It also says to save as a PDF with your first and last name in the file name.

On applicant tracking systems, William & Mary says 98% of Fortune 500 companies use one, and that some rank resumes by how closely they match the job description or by keyword counts. It doesn't cite where the 98% comes from, so read it as the career office's claim. Its advice is to use keywords from the position description and to spell out the long form with the acronym, such as "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)."

CPA Alberta adds a specific formatting warning: no tables, borders or page-width underlining, because they can interfere with applicant tracking systems. Its other rules are two pages at most for Canadian applicants, no more than five or six bullets per position, and each bullet no longer than two lines.

Where to find openings#

As of 21 October 2026, Intern Insider's accounting internships page lists more than 1,300 open accounting internships, and the first employer on the page is EY with 12 openings. The page doesn't give a single consistent company count, so we won't quote one. Before you apply to any of them, reread the posting and pull its keywords into your resume the way the checklist suggests.

If you're building the rest of the application, our university internship resume guide covers sections an accounting resume shares with every other major, and the cover letter guide covers whether to write one.