Ask HN: Graduating senior. Resume advice please | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Graduating senior. Resume advice please

5 pointsr3g11 comments

I am about to graduate from college and am putting my resume together.

I have built a couple of fun things over the last few years. Some were for school (larger school projects), some were not for school. Is it appropriate to basically have a list of projects I have done and a one line description of each on my resume? Or would people rather see a line like "see http://xxxxxx.com for a portfolio of things I have done" to avoid cluttering up 1/3 the page? If the former, how big or how cool should a project be to warrant putting it in the list? If the latter, then what kinds of things would you consider important on a resume for someone still in school?

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I'd look to summarize the projects individually or put them into groups and describe why they are important / show what you can do, then provide a link to the project or portfolio of projects. Sell it first, provide supporting details for a potential employer's further inspection. Regarding what to add and what not to, think about what story you want to tell. If you want to get into a specific year, include projects that pertain to it, even if they are small. If it's a certain technology, then those are the winners.

After you have your resume put together, I'd like to mention my startup, CollegeJobConnect. I apologize if this comes off as a shameless plug, but I think it is very relevant. On-campus recruiting and career service departments limit the true array of companies you could and should be connecting. We are trying to change that. We're an online platform that is dedicated exclusively to helping undergraduates (juniors / seniors) connect with cool companies for internships and full time hires throughout the entire academic year. We're working with a few hundred undergrads right now and over 15 companies. If you think it would be worthwhile, we'd love to get you onboard (takes 2 mins to get up and running). Having your resume summarize what you've done and what you can do is step #1, next is getting it in front of the right opportunities that you'd like to pursue.

Post your resume here for more feedback... or e-mail me, happy to offer suggestions.

It's hard to say which projects you should or should not post without having some exposure to the scales you are talking about. What I can say from firsthand experience, though, is that school projects are definitely great if they showcase interesting thinking or ability.

Something isn't bad or worthless just because it was done for a class; plenty of companies, even, developed that way.

It's annoying to see resumes more than 1 page long from college students. Please highlight the classes that you consider most important to you. I don't have forever to talk to my buddies from your school about your resume so it's useful to be able to zoom into the stuff that matters. If you did any special projects or stuff outside of class, please label it clearly. Some of us consider that stuff to be as important as classwork.

I would suggest that you summarize your projects. Potential employers will research you (my current employer asked me why I'm running an OpenID server on my blog), so you should have links ready if you can. I found one very valuable technique is to create/contribute to an open source project. That way if someone asks you for a code sample you can just point them to it. If you are looking to get hired by a small company, I think having a blog is a plus. Larger companies may or may not care depending on the hiring manager.

In either case you want to underscore your core competency in everything you showcase: resume, portfolio, blog.

Slightly off topic: I have not had good luck with technical recruiters. It may be that there are some great ones out there, but I have always found that the ones that reach out to me based on my resume on dice.com or monster.com have the need for a developer yesterday. It may be a great opportunity, but to me it always feels like the company is a bit disorganized if they don't know that they need someone to start until a week from their start date.

Good luck.

Pick your top 2-3 projects that would have relevance to the position you are applying for (i.e. you can probably leave off a low-level C project if you are applying for a Rails gig). Put these in a section called "Selected Technical Projects". Include the general date you worked on them (Summer 2010, Winter 2009, etc) and a link to the code/demo.

Then write a small description for each, ideally 2-3 short sentences. I like to have one sentence be "HR Friendly" and explain the technologies you used ("Built my own blog engine using ASP.NET MVC, MySQL and jQuery") and then one line about what I learned or why the project matters ("I built this project to learn MVC principles and learn about client-side Javascript" or "The code has been used by 50 other people to build their own blogs").

You should be including the link to your portfolio/github anyways as part of your general information. Make sure that the projects you list are easy to find on your personal site and there you can go into more detail, put screenshots, etc.

I agree, post your resume for more feedback.

That said, if you've got specific companies you're targeting, your best move is to tailor a version of your resume for each company, highlighting the projects most relevant to each company on their specific version of the resume. If you have an unrelated project that is your most significant work (e.g., a senior thesis), put that too.

But I agree with hugh3 that you'll potentially receive undesired judgement for the weakest projects, so listing them all can work against you.

Also of note, projects listed on your resume often become talking points for interviews. So whatever projects you list there, make sure they're fresh enough in your mind, and interesting enough in their implementation (technical challenges), that you can talk about them in a way that reflects your knowledge and mastery of the skills involved.

As for what other things to include on a resume, 'relevant coursework' is always a good one, again tailored for each job.

1. Project listings are terrific! Extracurricular work in the area you're trying to get hired into is a huge bonus as you apply for jobs.

2. One line descriptions are awful. If your resume is project heavy and light on school stuff, make your independent projects the focus and frame each in the context of how you accomplished what you did, what you learned during them, and what tech stack you chose for each one.

Going over one page is perfectly acceptable.

3. Listing your technical skills (programming languages, OS administration experience, DB development/support, etc) on a scale of 1-10 is helpful, too. It won't get you out of tech interviews but if you're honest it will help the interviewer figure out what to talk to you about. There's nothing worse than an interview where your resume and cover letter do zilch to help the interviewer get to know you.

how big or how cool should a project be to warrant putting it in the list?

Work on the assumption that anyone reading this is not going to actually look at more than one of your projects. Assume by sod's law that whichever one they look at will be the weakest, and they will judge you entirely based on that project. So leave off anything that you wouldn't be comfortable basing your entire reputation on.

Also, leave off school projects.

I think ~one school project is fine. I.e. if you had a big, multi-term project. If it was a homework assignment, no way though.

even if these schol projects were proposed by me to the teacher (not like HW assignment #3 from CS101)?

I had a great response when I coded my resume in HTML. I posted it to the web, jazzed it up using some colour and jQuery. Employers love seeing creativity.

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