How to Include Your Dietetic Internship on Your Resume

As a dietetic intern, completing your internship is a huge accomplishment and a major step toward becoming a registered dietitian. You have successfully completed over 1000 hours of entry-level work in the clinical, community, foodservice and even business settings.

During many of these experiences, you were producing tangible work like developing presentations, leading in-service trainings, creating handouts and counseling patients. So now that you’re done with your internship, you might be left wondering exactly how to include all of these accomplishments on your entry-level dietitian resume.

In the following article, we will outline exactly how to showcase your dietetic internship on your resume.

First, we’ll address the most common question that we receive- do I put my dietetic internship under experience or education?

Where should I put my dietetic internship on my resume?

When formatting your entry-level dietitian resume, it’s important to showcase relevant skills related to dietetics. Since you may not have a ton of previous experience, this portion of your resume may be scant. However, you absolutely can and should include your dietetic internship under experience. I recommend including this under a subheading titled either “Professional Experience” or “Nutrition Experience”.

 As you gain more work and professional dietetic experience, you will likely end up removing your dietetic internship from your resume altogether. Or you can also condense it to list just the program name and duration under the education section of your resume. But if you have little or no other prior work experience in dietetics, including your dietetic internship under the experience section is going to add more bulk and substance to your resume.

 In the next section, we’ll go over what information should be included about your dietetic internship.

What information should be included about the overall dietetic internship?

In general, it is appropriate to include the program’s name, the number of total supervised practice hours completed, and the dates of the program.

From there, you should prioritize your accomplishments from the dietetic internship based on the types of jobs that you are applying to. For example, if you’re applying for foodservice jobs, move your foodservice rotation to top spot and highlight more accomplishments from your foodservice rotation.

 You do not need to include every detail about each rotation site.

The following information may or may not be relevant:

·      Rotation Site Name & Type

·      Total Hours Spent at Site

·      Key accomplishments

 You do not need to include the address or city/state for each rotation site (this level of information is overkill). You also don’t need to list specific dates for each rotation nor do you need to list them in chronological order.

Depending on how much other work experience you have, you may opt to include more details for some rotation sites and fewer details for other rotations.

Here is how an entry-level dietitian who is interested in a community position might list their dietetic internship experience:

This is just one example of how to include your dietetic internship on your resume. You might include more or less information depending on job description. Regardless of what you decide, make sure that you tailor each resume to the specific job position.

If you would like more examples of dietitian resumes, download my Dietitian Resume Toolkit, where I share 3 example resumes.

What kinds of responsibilities and accomplishments should you include under each rotation?

During your internship you likely completed dozens of projects and day-to-day tasks, so how do you know which ones are the most important activities to include? In order to answer this question, you should refer back to the job description for clues about what types of responsibilities and skills are required for the position.

For example, if the job posting states:        

“Must have experience with motivational interviewing and patient education”.

Then you’ll want to highlight the different times that you had experience with patient education and motivational interviewing. Perhaps you did this both in your clinical and in your community rotation. You can highlight these accomplishments by focusing on the different ways that you provided patient education. Perhaps you provided one on one education and did a group education class. You can include both of those experiences.

For your other rotations, you can choose to highlight accomplishments that are transferrable skills. Perhaps you created a presentation and taught food sanitation to 100 employees. This would be great to highlight for a clinical position that requires public speaking and group education.

Again, you don’t have to include a high level of detail for each rotation that you completed. If you don’t have much space on your resume, you can and should omit details.

In the next section, we’ll talk about specific ways to make your dietetic internship experience stand out.

How can you make your dietetic internship experience stand out?

Sometimes the dietetic internship can feel like a blur and you aren’t quite sure what all you accomplished during the rotation. But I promise that you accomplished a lot of impressive tasks! Here are a few tips on how to make your dietetic internship sound impressive:

• Quantify your experience: To make your resume stand out, try to quantify your experience as much as possible. This can include the number of patients you saw during clinical rotations, the number of meals you helped prepare in foodservice rotations, or the percentage of improvement in patient outcomes you achieved through a project or initiative.

 If you need help with writing high-impact accomplishments or you don’t know how to identify keywords in a job description, I highly recommend booking a 1:1 session.

• Use strong action verbs: When describing your responsibilities and accomplishments, start each bullet point with a strong action verb to make your experience more impactful.

  For example, instead of saying "Assisted with patient education," say "Developed and implemented individualized nutrition education plans for over 50 patients."

•  Customize your resume: Finally, be sure to customize your resume for each job you apply for. Highlight the experiences and skills that are most relevant to the position you are applying for, and tailor your resume accordingly.

By following these tips, you can effectively showcase your dietetic internship on your resume and increase your chances of landing your dream job as a registered dietitian.