Improving Your Resume

Recruiters typically scan over your resume in less than a minute, and oftentimes for only a few seconds. Therefore, it’s critical that you have a good resume that can impress the reader in just a few seconds.

Here are some of my tips for improving your resume. Use my advice to supplement your understanding; use Google to find more tips on making a good resume instead of just going off of the tips below.

Tips:

Include the following sections, in decreasing order of importance: Education, Work Experience (if you have any), Honors/Awards, Projects, Skills (programming languages, tools, frameworks), Relevant Coursework.
Make your impact in your previous experiences clear.
- If possible, quantify your impact. For example, instead of “Did back-end system development” try “Sped up backend payment processing by 3x”, or instead of “Worked on novel computer vision research” try “Developed new object recognition model that outperforms state of the art model by 5%”.
- You can also state your impact qualitatively. For example, you can say things that would be impressive, such as “Led a team of 4 interns to develop Android app” or “Presented work at conference and received special recognition from company CTO” or “Singlehandedly reworked the front-end design and back-end data management of web application”.
Be concise. Only list the most important points about each item on your resume, since the reader may only spend a few seconds reading.
Have multiple versions of your resume and tailor each one to the specific internship or job you’re applying to so that the projects and experiences that you list are relevant to the job.
Avoid using too much technical jargon, especially if you think it’s niche and would be difficult for the reader to understand.
If your school deflates grades and it’s hard to get the GPA that you have, try to communicate that somehow. For example, if you were inducted into a CS, EE, or engineering honor society that only admits the top X% of your class, list that on your resume (in your Education section). For example, you can write “Member of Tau Beta Pi (top 1/8th of class)”.