Ask HN: Help a Highschooler with His Resume | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Help a Highschooler with His Resume

21 pointsSlyShy32 comments

learninfreedom.org/resume.pdf

I'm looking for a job or internship to hack at this summer. I'd like to get feedback from this group, because I'd enjoy being at a start-up or similarly challenging technical environment.

Right now my resume is tailored more to seeking a typical summer internship at a large company, I feel, but I'd like to know what you want to see more of. I was weighing mentioning skills like Rails and Node.js but I feel like just about anyone can claim experience. I'm leaning towards only listing skills I can currently demonstrate with a code sample.

To that purpose I'm working on open sourcing a handful of the components I've written for my project/start-up idea. The first of these is a high accuracy sentence tokenizing library, but it's of limited use until I release the HTML text sanitizer that goes along with it. (The full capability is taking Markdown or Textile and tokenizing those into fully formed sentences with the markup intact. There is a good amount of contextual logic that makes sure inline <code> and such niceties are recognized as part of the sentence, and correctly interpreting links, etc.)

I'm still working on open sourcing more of my code, but meanwhile I think I need to get into the job market for this summer. What do you think I should do?

Your resume is all about you. Successful sales is all about them. I'd focus less on what classes you're taking (of rather less intense interest to other people than it is to you) and more on what you can do for them. Give higher billing to the fact that you have Actual Shipping Products With Code You Wrote In Them. ("Code I wrote actually executes in a production environment! And it doesn't explode!") This is a signal of ability to complete tasks, maturity, and a bit of professionalism sadly lacking in most academically inclined programmers.

(And I say that as somebody who was 25 before he started using, e.g., source control and routinely writing things that successfully executed the first time I pronounced them "done".)

Thanks, that's encouraging to hear. There's a group of people who give me advice that make it sound like all companies care about is GPA and the likes. My response was skepticism, because there have to be people who have the experience to evaluate past that surface level.

I'll definitely be emphasizing the code I've written then, because I think that is a strong point. And to be fair to you, I think version control was probably more difficult when you were younger. Git has been a joy, especially compared to SVN, which was my first exposure to source control.

If you were being fair, you'd describe my younger self as lazy and ignorant. (My present self is slightly less ignorant -- still lazy, though.)

SVN is an adequate version control system, especially as compared to nothing. Heck, anything is better than nothing.

Work on an open source project. A real one. Mozilla is super-friendly to new guys, and working on Chromium means working with Google Engineers and other smart people.

Also, go to an epically good college. That'll be a huge help down the line.

You should probably consider working for a medium-sized company. Large companies have a tendency towards being soul crushing places for interns. A strong, almost-all-of-the-time tendency. The only exceptions might be Google or Facebook, but your odds of getting in there with only introductory programming. Most big companies want interns that they can recruit.

Also, go to an epically good college. That'll be a huge help down the line.

Seconded. Going to Northwestern has been a big leg up so far. Attending a top 20-30 school (especially in CS) may be the difference in getting an interview or not (where you can really show off ;)).

Attending a top 20-30 school (especially in CS)

Informational question here from an onlooker:

What's the recent consensus about which schools are the top twenty or thirty schools in CS, especially for a young person with an interest in start-up Web service work as contrasted with Wall Street or Big Company work?

Starting a list: Brown, CMU, MIT, Waterloo, BYU, UWashington, Stanford, RPI, Cornell, Cal

Northwestern ;)

Also, U Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Harvard, Yale (rest of the Ivies), Caltech, UChicago.

I'm sure that there are others. Personally I'm a big proponent of the liberal arts education so I'd probably put schools with very good general programs closer to the top, but that's my personal belief.

For more of a startup culture, gravitate more towards the coasts. Stanford is probably the best.

LOL BYU?? Is that a joke? Or are you just clueless?

Even if wallflower made a mistake, that would be no reason to be disrespectful.

The credited way to disagree with a statement that some computer science department is a top-thirty department is to name thirty other departments that are better, with rationale.

Damn man, your account is only 30 days old and you're already at -3 karma? Shooting for a record or something?

I'll do that. I've contributed to some small projects, but I was psyching myself out from working on big open source projects. There are probably all sorts of bugs that would be tedious for the experienced coders to fix, so that's probably a good place to start?

I'm assuming he's already a senior because she's a National Merit Finalist.

Where are you going to college?

I'm still waiting to hear back from several schools. Still a week to wait.

I would put the projects and job experience above the classes. Classes are easy and everyone with a (decent) brain can do well in them but spearheading a project and working without getting fired are two things that employers like to see.

Most employers do not care about your research interests. They are selfish beasts. All they are thinking about is can this person help me with a problem I have.

Do not send out a resume without a personalized coversheet. I know this is a pain but you NEED to do some research on the company and show them that you can craft a few sentences that pertain to a solution to a problem that they are having.

Also, If you know how to code, which it looks like you do, you should have no problem getting a job. Most employers are overwhelmed with terrible candidates who do not know how to program at all.

Good luck, I'm sure you will do fine.

Thanks for the tips. I've been preparing cover letters so I'm glad to hear confirmation that it's a good idea.

Do not go overboard with the cover letter. Make it a well edited 2-3 short paragraph letter that shows that you actually researched the company and you should be good. In life there are no absolutes so not all Recruiters/HR/Team leaders will read and value the cover letter but it will not go against you unless it is poorly constructed.

Also, if you have not been in the job world much you might not know that filling positions is not the most important thing that most of these people are doing so it is not really that high on their priority list. So what is needed is a phone call to the person telling them that you applied recently and was wondering if you had any questions about the resume. (This one might backfire sometimes but I think that it is a usual net win. The places that it might backfire at are usually places that you do not want to work at anyways.) They may have put you in a pile of possible contenders and if you want to differentiate yourself a personal call can show them that you are motivated and will follow through.

The best book I ever read on job interviewing, cover letters. Gave me the confidence to not fear interviews.

Content on website tracks 100% with book I bought. The reason I so strongly recommend this site is because the original author Brian Krueger wrote about job hunting from an insider's perspective, the recruiter's. What are they looking for... Also google the STAR technique.

http://www.collegegrad.com/jobsearch/Best-College-Cover-Lett...

Website: http://collegegrad.com

Cover letters don't seem to be effective for me. But definetly make sure to customize your resume for each place you apply to. It's a mistake to just have one resume and use it over and over again.

Just list the titles of the classes -- they are impressive enough. Put your GPA instead of your grades if it is good.

Emphasize your projects the most -- if you have a good GPA, you need to distinguish yourself b/c lots of people have good GPAs. So, startups and companies will be impressed that you do personal projects and show passion.

Elaborate on the exact role you played in each project. For example, for ImpishIdeas you say you "run" the community, but this is very vague. Did you found it and design the website? What specific things (briefly) did you do to "maneuver" it to a #1 site? Similarly with TactfulTokenizer -- after reading about it, I'm still unsure about your exact role, whether you were part of a larger team, etc. You may want a brief bulleted list of major things you did for each project, just so it doesn't become too wordy.

I would put your honors (which are great but lots of people have them) at the very bottom.

I'd also get rid of the "Languages" section (unless you're applying for an internship with unique language requirements). Instead, mention the technologies you used in the body of each of your projects. The problem with a "languages" section is that everyone will list a ton of languages, and it is unclear how well the person knows each of them (even if you say "highly skilled" or whatnot), thereby making it a useless section for differentiating candidates.

Definitely put practical project/job experience above education. That'll help differentiate you.

When I took Csci 1901 (at the U of MN, see Matthew's resume), I—and the other 200 people in the class—had an end of term project that applied what we'd learned. I'm guessing you probably had to do the same, right? Mention your end of term class projects. It'll help make your in-class experience seem more concrete.

On a vaguely related note: if you have the chance, take anything Loren Terveen or Joe Konstan offer. The experience you'll gain from their classes will pay off in spades down the road.

Yeah, we did a little connect 4 AI project, except that you can drop pieces in from the left side and they float to the right, in addition to normal dropping from the top. I actually tied for first place in the tournament. Didn't figure that sort of thing would be interesting on a resume, but that's a good tip.

I'll be sure to look out for their names, that's a helpful tip.

Way back in 1999 when I did it while enrolled in PSEO we had a game AI. I don't think I tied for first place. Definitely worth mentioning that :)

Also, take Chris Dovolis and Phil Barry if you get the chance. They're great guys, too. I think they both occasionally teach 1902.

I took 1901 with Dovolis and that was well worth my while. I'd done Lispey things before, so I was initially skeptical, but that course started a love affair with functional languages.

My 5 cents, but I don't really like the A, B, A-, etc. Focus on what you know and what you like.. and if you want to show your grades, just join them on another paper.

Can't say I was a huge fan either. And here are your three cents change. ;)

Filling a resume at your age (yes, making an assumption here)/level of experience is tricky, but one the plus side it's easy to stick to the 1 A4 rule.

I'd strip the details of the courses you've followed - people reading the resume will probably know the general details already and use that space to add a section on motivation and interests (feel free to tailor that to whoever you're sending it to). Would front-end development interest you? Backend scalability? Systems automation? Networking? Security? Don't mention specific technologies, just some broad problem domains.

Good luck!

As someone who is currently reviewing many resumes for two internship positions at IBM, I can confirm that you've put too much emphasis on the classes you've taken (but you are in high school, so that's understandable). I took the liberty of highlighting the areas that I find interesting in your resume: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1733/slyshy.png

My advice would be to continue to expand that bottom section with further projects (the open source world is awesome for this).

Thank you, that's very concrete.

Your CV is often the primary reference point in an interview. So, it makes sense to put a number of "conversational hooks" in it that you are prepared to tell a compelling (true) story about. If you have a series of mini stories prepared in your head, and you've written your CV in such a way that you're likely to get asked about them, then you're well prepared.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com