September 9, 2009
Posted by elorax in Uncategorized.add a comment
While I decide where the get an engineering internship series should go next, I thought I’d talk about a few of the posts here on Young Engineer that I think provide some valuable and unique advice.
5 Things Engineers Should Do In College
This was the first post I published, and it’s been one of the more popular posts on the blog ever since. This is a great post for freshmen and sophomore engineering students to read, to help you plan the experiences you want to have while you’re still in school. At some schools, you may have to look carefully for good opportunities. This post can help you decide where to look and which opportunities to go for.
Give a Better Technical Presentation
This post doesn’t get a ton of hits, which is unfortunate, because giving presentations is a critical skill for any engineer. The ability to communicate technical concepts and ideas to a variety of audiences is necessary for engineers in academia and in industry. Engineering students should make all the opportunities they can to practice their presentation and speaking skills.
This post also gets far less love than it should. Project-based courses are excellent opportunities for students to build valuable experience in the classroom. Picking the right project topic, one you can do original work on, or one that relates closely to job openings in your field, can give you something great to bring up in a job interview, even if you have few other experiences.
Writing Your Engineering Resume Part II September 2, 2009
Posted by elorax in Uncategorized.Tags: career, internships, resumes, skills, undergrad
add a comment
Last week, I guided you through doing a brain dump of your experiences, education, honors, and skills. This week, we’re going to use your notes from last week to craft a powerful student engineering resume.
The point of a resume is to get you an interview. Everything you put on your resume should demonstrate your value to a future employer in some way. As I’ve said before, it’s a good idea to keep a watch on entry level job postings in your industry. This gives you an idea of what employers are looking for, and helps you pick out the things that are going to help sell you to a potential employer. Feature things that make you look good prominently. If it doesn’t really contribute, leave it out. This means that many of the things you wrote down on your brainstorm last week are not going to make it into your final resume. This is fine. It’s actually a good thing.
The Basics
In most resumes, the name and contact information of the candidate go right at the top of the page. On my resume, I put my engineering discipline under my name as well, materials engineering. Even if you’re all for open source software such as open office or web-based clients like google docs, you should write your resume in the industry standard software, Microsoft Word. There’s no reason for any student resume to be longer than one page. Avoid tiny fonts, and use white space to help make your resume more readable. A resume is also not the place to use tons of different fonts, or fonts that are difficult to read. Career Hub has some advice for naming your resume file. They also have an excellent post about using keywords effectively to get interviews when applying to jobs online.
Education
Title the section education, and put the name of your school on the next line down. The line after that, list your major, GPA, and expected date of graduation. If you’re an upperclassman and you’ve taken lots of classes that are relevant to your major, make a list of relevant classes. You can change what you include on this list based on which job posting you’re applying to, or reorder the classes based on the job posting. For example, if I was applying for a job in which I would be doing failure analysis, I would put failure analysis at the top of my Relevant Coursework subsection, so it would be the first thing the employer or hiring manager saw. Remember that list of projects you made? Those don’t go in the education section. Instead, put those under experiences. First list the project title, then the class in which you completed it. E.g. Frog Toy, Intro Mechancial Design
Experiences
The experience section is where engineering student resumes really need to shine. Many students all over the country in your major have taken the same classes that you are taking. Your experiences are what set you apart from other students. On a traditional resume, experiences are listed like this:
Company
Job Title, date 1 – date 2
- Responsibility 1
- Responsibility 2
Instead of responsibilities, it’s better to list your experiences in the form of results, or what you achieved. For each responsibility you wrote down in the brainstorm, think some result or final product you accomplished. Numbers are a good way to communicate this, because everyone can understand them easily and they don’t take up as much space as explaining with sentences would. E.g. Raised $4000 for breast cancer research, or reduced processing time by 30%. It’s okay to ballpark numbers you don’t know exactly, but it’s best to be conservative if you do this. For ideas on what experiences you might have, or for ideas on where to get more experience, check out this post or this post.
Skills
Feature your skills in the top half of the page. If specific skills are requested in a job posting, put them at the front of your list. It’s not necessary to use whole sentences to describe your skills. Instead of: “I can program in Java, C++, Python, and Perl.” Use: Programming languages: Java, C++, Python, Perl.
Other Stuff
If you can craft all ‘the other’ stuff you do into a cohesive whole, go ahead and include it. It’s likely you won’t be able to make everything fit. This is fine. A resume is not the history of your life. Choose to emphasize what your employer should most know about you. For me, it’s entrepreneurship, but since I’m co-founder of one startup and I managed another, it also demonstrates my leadership potential. Good things to emphasize with this other stuff are leadership activities, service activities, or entrepreneurial activities. Unless you’re world class, it’s probably best to leave off athletic achievements. Volunteering for policital or religious organizations is a descision you should make for yourself. Keep in mind that your affiliations could be a turn-off to some employers. This section should be smaller in importance on your resume relative to the skills and experiences. Remember in this section you can also put your experiences in terms of results. For example, in a sales job, estimate how much you increased sales, or improved custsomer satisfaction. Or, as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, how many homes did you help build or repair?
Awards
Fit awards in wherever, or make their own section, at your discretion. If you’re only going to highlight one or two, fit them in with the other sections. If you’re listing four or more, you can make a bulleted list. Scholarships go under education. If you have many small scholarships, total them up, i.e. recipient of $55,000 in scholarship funds.
Free Resume Reviews!
I will review your resume for free if you send it along to me by email, e (dot) lorax (at) gmail (dot) com. I’ll review resumes for up to two months after the date this post was published. Use “Engineering Resume for [Your Name] as the subject line.
