Can This Student's Resume Land Them An Internship?

Let's pretend that this was a very trivial thing for them to go build. If they can call out something, the fact that they can call it out here, if they genuinely can talk through it, I think that that can add a lot of value. All right, today we are going to look at a resume for someone who's interested in applying for internships. They reached out and they said they have their resume ready to go. They aren't graduating quite yet. That's coming up for them. And then they also mentioned maybe some Microsoft internship roles. So, let's see what this résé is all about. And just a friendly reminder for you that if you're interested in having your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.ca. Let's go check this resume out. So, we have at the very top, a lot of it is of course redacted, but they have their GitHub, their LinkedIn, some contact information. I think that's great if you got it listed. At this point in time, I would just kind of say to everyone like try to make sure you have some stuff on GitHub. Try to make sure that your LinkedIn's up to date. All of these things are just extra helpful. They're not necessarily required. They're not, you know, something that someone's necessarily going to gate all of the applicants on, but if you have it, I would add it, right? It's just extra helpful. We have education rate at the top. Of course, this person is a student, so I think to me that makes a lot of sense. And they have projects. So projects and skills in terms of the the format of this resume. I think the organization of this makes sense because I would personally recommend to people to have the most impactful part of their their resume as close to the beginning as possible. Usually that would mean something like projects or work experience, you know, right from the beginning. But having education in this case, I think makes sense because of internships. I do think that how they've organized this is pretty good. I like that the bulk of what we see like literally on this screen as a onepage resume is projects. Okay, we're gonna start with the first project because I think they've done such a tremendous job with this one that my recommendation for them is going to be do it for the others, do it for more projects. Like this is really, really good. They have a project that listed the timeline from 2025 to uh Jan 2026. And then what you'll notice on all of these, let me switch over to my highlight just so I don't accidentally redact more. They've essentially bolded data points on improvements. They've bolded keywords in terms of tech. Right? So this is the kind of thing that I think is super awesome for even people with lots of experience. And this is a project they have improve lambda image processing latency by 4.4x. Right? So they went from 6 seconds down to like around 1.5 seconds by tuning memory allocation and they explained how they were doing it. They were analyzing pricing trade. Like this whole thing, this whole first one, I don't know why my highlighting is going all crazy, but this whole thing I think is like a rockolid statement. If you could do this across like every single thing on your resume, heck yeah. Especially as an intern. But of course, I will make a note right now. There are other things outside of just technical details that can help, but I think like this framing is just incredible. Okay, deployed a file sharing platform AWS EC2 fast API. So, we get into some tech, right? This is a really good line item for a bunch of different tech that talks about the pieces that someone has experience with at least related to this project. And then when we have a line, again, my highlighting is doing weird stuff. when we have a line like this again more tech but at least what's especially interesting between you know let's say these two lines we have some cloud infrastructure we have the concept of having backend experience working with a database we have CI/CD and then we can start to see things like authentication coming in these are different things that if you're looking into web development you would really want to be able to call some of these out if you have them eventdriven image processing pipeline that's Pretty interesting. We're starting to think about systems in this case. It's not just a CRUD application. Again, not that there's anything wrong with that, but this is again something you can call out on a resume. That's just even more on top of a CRUD application. We see S3 triggered Lambda functions. Again, right here, achieved 84% test coverage. We're talking about impact. It's something measurable. And they talk about how they do that with PISET. Refactor the API into modular services using dependency injection. Cool. So to give you an example with something like this line, I can see that dependency injection as a concept is familiar to them. Refactoring as a concept and a practice is familiar to them. And then it says at the end improving testability and maintainability. So they have some understanding of why or some reason for doing that. Now in an interview like let's say this person is selected for an interview because something like this on the resume standing out. It's great. in an interview. I would love to talk to this person about this line, right? Refactored the API into modular services using dependency injection. Cool. When you say something like refactored, it tells me you had something, you went to something else. Walk me through that. What were the challenges? Why did you do that? Like why did you go that way versus this way? What were the tradeoffs? It's not that there's like a right or a wrong answer, but hearing someone talk through how they were doing this kind of stuff, I think is very interesting. Tells me a lot about how they're thinking about different engineering problems. To me, let's pretend that this was a very trivial thing for them to go build. Let's just assume that if they can call out something like, you know, to them maybe refactoring wasn't that interesting or whatever because I just happen to be doing it. like the fact that they can call it out here, if they genuinely can talk through it, I think that that can add a lot of value. So, I'm saying that because you might have some things that are like this and maybe you're thinking, "Oh, that's just a minor detail." You know, I built the first version and I had to go build, you know, two, three, four versions of it just to get this thing working. It's a side project. Tell me about that. I would love to hear about that. I would love to see that you built something had to iterate. And why is that interesting? That's because that's how real software works, right? We're not just building green field projects from 0 to 100. We press the ship button and then move on to the next thing. A lot of the time you're working on systems that exist. You have to extend them. You have to make changes to things that are in production. How do we do that? I think that's a super interesting one to call out. But overall, this framing for a project I think is awesome. Just to give you an example, just looking at the shape, not even reading the words, looking at the shape of the other projects, I would say they will not compare to this one, just the shape alone. But if we go look at them, it's not like the projects are bad. I just think that they can do a similar type of exercise for the other projects like they did for the first. Now, let's jump over to this next one. Real time collaborative code editor. Again, they have their GitHub link for it. Building a real-time collaborative code editor using Go websockets, Postgress. I don't know why they didn't bold these things, right? Minor thing, but like it actually stood out to me up top. I would bold them here, right? This is a statement that I think is talking about just uh some some tech usage, which is fine. websocket connections with guerilla websockets to synchronize code changes across across the client in real time. To me, this sentence doesn't add much more than the sentence above. We get to see guerilla websocket as one more thing, but I already see websockets here. To me, not a lot of value add in that second statement. Designing modular backend architecture with separate handlers, services, database layers. We can see databases, Postgress. This to me is only a little bit of extra on top of this first line. So when I look at all of this that's here, my sort of criticism of this is like mostly what I'm getting out of here is that you used these three pieces of technology. You used go, you use websocket, and you use Postgress. Again, it's not to say that the project is bad or isn't a good example of a project to work on and showcase, but talk to me more about the stuff that like you were doing up top, right? Did did websockets just work the first time? Like did you measure anything with your websockets? Talk to me about how you're deploying this thing. It's live, right? Like what is what does all that look like? Did you did you have to refactor anything? Like talk to me about some of the design decisions you made because to me it's it's really just listing some of the the pieces of tech. There is nothing wrong with listing the tech, but if you compare it to what was above, uh, like I look at a line very much like this first one, I can't highlight for some reason. I'm so sorry. That to me is very interesting. And then, you know, refactoring that kind of stuff. Like, I want to hear more about what was going on, not just that you use some technology. Especially because these three lines that I have highlighted mostly kind of boil down to like you could put that into one line. I think the project it's probably very interesting what like it says real time collaborative code editor real time websockets right those things usually go hand in hand so like tell me about like did you did you jump to websockets right away how did you know to go use websockets right I want I just want I want more okay and this is only a single page resume you could you could add more there's there's space for for more information on here if If we jump to the third one, I think we're going to see sort of the exact same pattern. Again, we're missing out on some of the styling. Built fast API backend Postgress. Highlight these things. Bold them. You did it up top. I think it works really well for things to stand out. Integrated V API voice calling API to trigger automated phone reminders. Cool. How did that work? Right. Like what? Tell me more about the setup of this. How did like why did you pick whatever technology you picked to go do it? [snorts] How did you measure success? Tell me about I want to understand more about the pros and cons, right? We see implemented JWT authentication. Okay, so we're getting a little bit more around O which is good. Some database stuff. We see Postgress here as well. That's good. And then these are features, right? Database schema for user accounts, medications, schedule reminders. So, we can see that they're talking about features related to the schema, but like that's not telling me a lot about that's a good way to say this. You're telling me about what is done, but not like rationale behind it or like decision making or like what you learned. So, this does really boil down to like the sort of the first three bullets kind of boil down to like just listing things versus impact or uh what you're learning, that kind of stuff. I think you can do a lot with that. One thing that's really nice in this third project though is this last line that stands out. Okay, collaborate with the front-end team. So, this is an example of working with stakeholders. They might be building the same thing as you, but you're working with other people. these stakeholders are part of your team and they happen to be focused on something different. Okay, so that could be really interesting to bring up in an interview and talk through that. How did you guys align on things? Right, so that's a really good one to call out. And then it's a 36-hour hackathon deadline if there's a way to like add more context here. How did you prioritize things? How did you collaborate? How did you break down what your goals were and make progress towards those? like there's opportunity to try and call some of that stuff out here because this is the kind of stuff that if I were interviewing an intern or anyone, I would love to kind of talk through this and hear about how you made those decisions and how you interacted with people. Okay, so overall, I really like this. I think this first one is just like I think this is such a great example and I think that this line down here the collaboration part with stakeholders some sort of constraint I think that's great to call out tell me more about it right tell me about how you made decisions what you learned what your challenges were I think it's a great start skills at the bottom this is where I would put them listed out like this in addition to what this person's done where they list them in bold throughout the usage of their projects how to make this even better. Aside from the things I've already said, more projects, more experience. These are things that are in your control, right? I don't know what the magic number is. It's not like it's not five projects, six projects, three projects, but I think as you're applying for your internships and jobs in general, if you are looking to enhance what you have to offer, what you have to showcase, you can control the different projects that you're working on, spending time on, learning about. Okay, so great start. I think this is awesome and I would just keep moving in the direction of the framing that we have uh particularly in this first one. So, awesome work. Friendly reminder that if you want your resume reviewed, submit it to résumés devleader.ca. And I wish you the best of success with applying to your next job, whether it's an internship or full-time role. Thanks, and I'll see you next time.