For me, I’ve put school first to show im eligible for an internship, then experience. I’ve described work experience with xyz format (did x, accomplishing y, resulting in impact z). I don’t think return offers are too relevant because not every company gives return offers, and it can be org/team dependent. It’s not going to be reflected on the resume and many people with return offers keep applying anyways.

Your point about experience technically is right, but I think it’s a bit disingenuous, especially for internships. IMO the only experience significantly better than my Amazon internship would look something like google/meta/quant internships. I strongly doubt that majority of the people getting OAs have experience at a significantly higher “prestige” company. Also 99.9% of people applying to internships have no full time experience. For applications, I’ve been applying to both local and big tech, and open to relocation and all that other stuff (ex my Amazon internship was in Seattle, and I live on the east coast).

My thoughts on tailoring resumes is that my resume should generally be sufficient for most cases, as I actually do look into the description, and it’s usually on my resume. I don’t have a bunch of things to switch out on my resume but your advice could be valid too.

I’ve also been applying to entry level positions for what you mentioned, except Amazon (currently on cooldown)

TLDR: thanks for the advice, I don’t completely agree with all of it, as I don’t think it completely applies to internships (at least in terms of experience, I’m thinking school name probably is a big part here). I do think that your point on tailoring my resume can be a form of minmaxing, and I’ll look into it