Side Projects That Stand Out?! - Intern Resume Review

Welcome back to the résé review series where I review the résumés that you send in. My name is Nick Cosantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. In today's video, we're going to look at a resume that was sent in for someone who is going through their post-secary education and looking for more internships. As we'll see on this individual's resume, they already have one internship. They're seeking more. And when they wrote in, they even provided a couple of questions that they'd like me to answer as I go through this. And I think that that's a good reflection on their part because they're asking for some specific feedback. If you're interested in having the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.ca. And before I jump into this resume, I just want to remind folks that no, this is not a ré grilling session. I'm not going to be making fun of anyone or picking on anyone. I do need to find ways to offer constructive criticism. So that will mean that I am going to be particular about things. It's going to be from my perspective. So, other people may disagree with some of this feedback. But what I don't want to do is just read through this and say thumbs up and not give any meaningful feedback. Everyone that has submitted a resume to me has asked for constructive criticism. They want my opinion on this. So, that's why I'm doing this. It's not to try and find random résumés on the internet and try to make fun of anyone. With that said, let's jump over to this individual's resume and I'm just going to read out the three questions that they were interested in having me answer so we can go through that at the same time. They started off by saying, "Do you understand the gist of what I did in my previous job and how I could improve that?" And so, that will be one of the primary things that I think I'm always reflecting on as I go through resume. So, that's a really good one to call out. Do you think that my projects are decent enough to stand out? Again, another critical thing that when I'm trying to give advice on résumés, it's how do you stand out compared to other people, right? Because if I'm reviewing résumés as a recruiter or a hiring manager and there's a thousand of them, if they all look very similar, it's going to be very difficult to pick someone who's obviously standing out, right? So, you want to look for ways to stand out. And then they also added in, "How should I broaden my horizons as a developer?" This one's a little bit more general, and maybe we can see how we can answer that as we go through. So to start off right at the top they do have their LinkedIn profile, GitHub and lead code profile. So as someone who's reading through a resume, if I wanted to find any more additional details, I know where to do that right at the top. At a glance, we can see that from their professional experience, they have their one internship right at the top. The bulk of their resume is consisting of projects that they've worked on on the side and they have some education called out at the bottom and then some technical skills. Now, personally, I have mentioned before on different ré review videos that I like the idea of calling out technical skills. If you want to call some of them out in a dedicated section, I think that that can work. But I do also like, and we'll see in just a moment, that this individual has mentioned these different skills and uh areas that they've focused on throughout their different experience. So, in my opinion, that's the most helpful way to do it because that way I can see how those things are relevant to the different experiences that they've had. And I'm going to call out one more thing because we can spend the bulk of our time on the projects and the work experience. But when it comes to education, uh like I see primary education, secondary education, and then their postsecary that they're going through. Even at this level, when someone's going for internships, I wouldn't call out primary or secondary education. You're already going for your bachelors. At this point, I don't think that these other uh two types of education are going to help at all. And really, they're just some real estate being taken up on your resume. So, I would personally just omit those completely. But let's go back up to the top and start looking at the professional experience. And let's keep in mind as we go through their work experience that they wanted to make sure that I understood the gist of what they were doing and how they could improve it. So, that is going to be one of the primary focuses here. So, they go on to say that at their job they were a full stack web developer intern and that's of course because they're going through internships and like I mentioned they're trying to use this resume for more internships. So they said that they refactored and modernized a React application migrating it to Nex.js for enhanced performance and maintainability. I have an idea of some of the work that they would have been doing there. But one thing that I would always say is that if you have something like enhanced performance and maintainability, how much and by what measure, right? So be ready to be able to articulate that because I think that uh from your perspective as the person who wrote this or if your resume is kind of similar the way it's worded I don't know that when I read this right uh enhanced performance did you get a 2% performance gain in what areas are they even relevant areas maintainability how do you measure that it's actually more maintainable right so if you're going to make claims like this I would say the most effective way to make a claim and to make it valuable is to actually back it up with something that has some evidence there. You'll notice that in these ré review videos, like that's one of the things that I always try to call out is like if you can use quantitative data to back things up, that goes a long way. And the reason why that's the case is because you as the individual that went through doing the work and you delivered on something and it was successful, you might know this kind of thing. It might be very obvious to you the type of impact that had. But me as the person reading the resume, if it's not immediately obvious to me, it's almost lost on me. That's one of the key things as we go through résumés that I always like to remind people is that every single line on your resume, you should be thinking, why does the person care, right? So, if I am the one reading this, as you write a particular line, why should Nick care about this line? And you should do that for every single line on your resume. Just a quick note that if we think about the education part, right, for the primary education, why would I care about that? It's not meant to be facitious or to pick on this person, but it's a question that you want to ask because if you have a good reason for it, then there's probably a good reason that you should include it. But if you're kind of questioning like I don't really know but uh I don't know what value that's going to add but I think I need to like I would just find something else to include or even think about the framing of what you wrote because it might make sense to you but if it doesn't make sense when you start to frame it why should the person care then try to think about changing your wording around that. Next up, they say developed a sophisticated grain analyzer web app that pro uh that processes user uploaded images through a CNN model displaying analysis reports with bar graphs and data tables. Okay, so this is kind of interesting. Develop a sophisticated grain analyzer web app. Um we see words like sophisticated here. It's this is one of those I'm not trying to be like super critical on this, but just to kind of again think about the framing. Develop a sophisticated grain analyzer web app. So what what makes it sophisticated, right? This is one of those things that probably the person that wrote this is like, "Hey man, like this is really cool because of X, Y, and Z, right?" Like they know why it's cool. They know why it's sophisticated. What makes it sophisticated? Because I read this and I see developed a sophisticated grain analyzer web app and I don't know what makes it sophisticated. It doesn't tell me anything about that here. So in my opinion, it's not that it's wrong or bad. It's like it's almost like a missed opportunity to showcase something more. So, I just wanted to call that out because I think this is one of those like simple examples that if you go through that exercise of like why should the person care about this as you're they're reading it, then you can try to optimize this a little bit more. Implemented interactive image plotting using plotlyjs allowing users to view edit detail reports for each grain in the image. Okay. and then enabled users to download analysis reports in PDF format enhancing the usability and accessibility of the application. Okay, so in this part I kind of see like they're using some some JavaScript libraries. So that's cool. They're working in some front-end features. Uh so I'm trying to articulate the things that I am gaining or trying to understand as I read through this resume because it's one of the things that they asked. Can I get the gist of what they were doing? And then at the bottom of that work experience created a comprehensive back-end functionality using flask and MongoDB. So we can see some of the technology use cases coming together in terms of like the skills and things like that that these are things that they use while on the job. And they say including data storage and retrieval for user analyses and an admin page for monitoring user activities. In general, if I were to try and say what this person was able to do in their internship, it looks like they did cover a broad range of things. I am going to make an assumption uh and this is an important thing for you to consider when you put resumes together is like especially when you're working in teams. What you don't want to have happen is lump yourself into just stuff the team did. Like my team was responsible for 20 different things. and then you kind of just like overgeneralize what you worked on and it's kind of like the team worked on that. So you should try and make sure that you're explaining things from what you were doing and trying to make that very clear. So in this particular case, this person's not saying things like my team did X, my team did Y. So this kind of sets me up to believe that the things that they're mentioning are things that they actively worked on. So just wanted to mention that for framing. I would say looks like a a bunch of different front-end stuff that they were able to work on. Uh they covered a bunch of ground, right? So they were able to do some plotting. Um they have PDF conversion. So again, integrating with some different tools and things like that. When they talk about usability and accessibility, again more front-end components. So I think that that's helpful. Displaying analysis reports with bar graphs and data tables. Again, like more usability front-end kind of uh functionality. And then they did mention created comprehensive backend functionality using flask and MongoDB. Right? So when I read this to me it feels like the bulk of what they worked on and this is just my interpretation. Right? So this is feedback for the person that if this doesn't it's either I've just misunderstood and that's totally possible or there's an opportunity to refine this and make it more more representative. But to me it feels like there was a lot of front-end work and again nothing wrong with that. So, a lot of front end work, but they did also get to work on backend pieces as well. So, that's where the Flask and MongoDB part comes in. Relatively speaking, it feels like there was less backend work. Again, not a good or bad thing. I'm just mentioning that the way that I see this written out makes me feel that way. So, if this person was like, "Oh man, like I know it's full stack. I know I did both, but I would really like to communicate like a lot more effort and uh sort of growth that was done in the backend part of the development. Then I would enhance this to call that out more. You know, dive into those things more. Take that last bullet point, maybe break it apart into a couple of things where you can talk about the impact that you had doing that. But otherwise, a lot of what I'm seeing is uh I think more more centered around the front-end development. Again, nothing wrong with it. I'm just saying that's the understanding that I have reading this. If that is not right, then perhaps look at changing up the wording. Overall, I think that's pretty good though, especially for an internship. I like that it covered a lot of ground. I've had conversations before with interns where at some places or some internships, you might have a single internship project that's very narrow. And it doesn't mean that it's not impactful or not valuable, but the scope of what you're doing might be very narrow. So, I've done this with interns. I've had internship projects kind of like this for myself. Uh, but I think I've also seen and I don't want I don't know if I can generalize it as more successful, but I think there's I've seen pretty good success with this where instead of just giving the intern one dedicated project that it's very specific, you kind of integrate them into the team. And that can be challenging. There's pros and cons to these things, but it to me it feels like when I read this individual's experience, it wasn't here's one project, put your head down on it and go work on and deliver it. To me, it kind of seems like, hey, you're kind of integrated into the team and you're doing a bunch of different things. I think that again, like I've seen good success with this because people get exposed to a handful of different things and then they can kind of figure out, especially as interns, what they like to gravitate towards. I kind of get that feeling when I read this and it sounds like it was good internship experience. Overall, I feel like this is pretty solid. Okay, let's dive into the projects. And one of the things that they were asking was if the projects feel like they're significant enough to stand out, right? So, one of the things at a very high level that I noticed, and this is just going to be about timing. So, at the time of recording this, this is March 9th, 2025. And what I'd like to point out is the dates on the projects. Now, this might seem like a small detail and maybe it is a small detail, but when I'm thinking about this, I I see and we're going to talk through the projects, right? But we have like if we start at the bottom, July to September 2023. So that's a couple years ago. And so that's July, August, September. So like 3 months worth of a project. Then we have October to December. And so that's October, November, December. Another three months of a project. Then we have in 2024 May and June. So that's two months of a project. The point that I'm getting across here is that it seems like uh two things. One is that the projects are smaller in scale, which there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I'm just kind of making an observation. Projects are smaller in scale because they're a couple of months in length. The other part is that uh there seems to be and again this could just be because of when this resume was last updated seems like there if I can call it gaps in project development that might just be because they're back at school and they're busy. But something at a high level that can stand out is I think when you have larger projects this is a personal opinion of mine. It's not that these projects are bad. We haven't even read through them yet together at least. And uh I just wanted to call out that sometimes when you have longer running projects that are they can be more significant. There's more opportunity to go back, refactor them, rearchitect them, you have more experience within the project that's a lot more akin to real software that's being built over time. The reason again that I'm calling this out and we can kind of do a bit of guessing here when we start to read through these projects is that sometimes when people say, "Hey, I created something. I built this project." It could have been the equivalent of just copying a tutorial. And I'm not saying that's the case for this person, but when you have something that seems like it's smaller scale, it's like how much of that did you do that was you actually learning and building versus you just kind of clicking through and following a tutorial. So more projects does not necessarily mean better. So I think that's why when we go through these, we can talk about the value of them. So I think first of all, again, at a high level, I like that technologies called out for each one of them. There's GitHub if I wanted to read more. I'm going to talk about that more in detail when we go to look at the third project and I'll explain why. So on the first project developed an application that's an intelligent email classification platform. It streamlines mail management and organization. So it's pretty cool. I think at a high level I can understand what this is trying to do, which is an important thing to call out because if you have a project and I have literally no idea what it is or understand it, then it makes it hard for me as the reader of a resume to understand what you're trying to accomplish with that. Then they talk about the technology they use. So utilize Nex.js, Tailwind CSS, Shad CN, Assernity UI to create a polisher, responsive user interface. Okay. Um, so this line tells me technology that's used, but so far I have an idea of what the thing is, some of the tech that's used, and then integrated Google Oath for user authentication, for fetching the mail, and then using Gemini API for the classification part, and then displaying results in a data table. I get an idea of some of the pieces that are used, right? So the last two bullet points there just tell me about tech that's used. I don't have a really good understanding just from reading this like necessarily what was learned and sort of like the value of this project for the individual. Was this something where it was an experiment with trying to integrate with different uh APIs like so using Gemini API and then integrating with Gmail like was that the goal of it? I don't really understand what the goal of this was and this is again this is my interpretation reading through this resume. I'm not saying it's a bad project or anything like that, but what is the the goal? Why should I care when I read this? Is it to call out that you were building something with these different technologies and trying to show that, hey, I'm gaining that experience? Because if so, like that's totally valid. I think that's fair. Then I go back to the time spent. So May, June, you have sort of two months called out here for working with some of these technologies, which is fine. It's just that that's not a long time. But as we go into the next project, we'll see that we see something like again next.js called out again Tailwind CSS, Shad CN, right? So we'll see some of these repeating and now I can start to build a bit more of a mental model around how much sort of uh exposure this individual has to these technologies. Right? So next project says constructed an application that's a live collaborative digital canvas facilitating real-time communication and creativity among users. Okay. So, again, I think so far what's really standing out is they have good like oneliners that tell me what these things are. I think there's a lot of value in that. And I like the idea of the real time communication here because real time is going to suggest that there are some interesting constraints in how you build a system like this. It's one thing to be able to have data that goes somewhere and then given some amount of time you can go get the data again. But when it's real time, this is suggesting that you're going to have, you know, multiple things trying to interact literally in real time expecting data freshness. So then they go on again to call out the technology again to create an intuitive and visually captivating interface. I mean that whole sentence to create an intuitive and visually captivating interface enabling seamless user interaction. To me, this is kind of like, and sorry, this is going to sound critical, but this is kind of like when you write uh essays in English class and you're trying to just add words and make it sound nice. I don't know what any of that is actually supposed to mean in practice, right? I know what all those words mean, but what does what does that mean in terms of like what value you were creating? You could mean anything by that, right? So another angle to think about some of these things is like if it leaves me guessing at what it's supposed to mean that it's probably little value intuitive and visually captivating interface by what means what made it intuitive what made it visually captivating enables seamless user interaction I don't know how you did that I understand that this is you know real time collaborative uh type of uh application here I don't know how you get to that point just by having those techn technologies listed there. That's my call out here. It's not that you didn't do it or that it's impossible. It's just that like you probably understand how that's the case and the way that it's written. It's leaving me guessing at how that's the case. So, next part says, "Implemented live blocks for real-time collaboration." Okay, there we go. Allowing users to add images, comments to see others cursors, and download drawings in PDF format. Cool. I think something that's standing out across a couple of these is like um there's probably some way to talk about the hosting and deployment of some of these pieces. That might be an interesting call out. So, just wanted to mention that this one again like it's it feels kind of light and it's not because these projects seem light. It's because I don't get a good understanding aside from listing tech what you did, right? And that might be the side effect of these being shorter projects because you were able to stand something up. you saw the functionality work and then you said, "Okay, I'm done." and move to something else. But when you spend, and I'm not saying it's impossible for shorter projects, but when you spend more time on things, you can start to look at how things were architected, designed, and see if you want to go in different directions, redesign parts, rewrite parts, or did they stand the test of time in your design? If so, like that might be something that you can explain why that's the case. Now, I want to get to this file compression one. This one says, "Engineged a sophisticated file compression system employing Huffman coding and decoding algorithms, optimizing file storage and transfer efficiency." So, okay, this is pretty cool. Um, I think that for me, just as an example, when I was working at a digital forensics company, right, I did this for 8 years before Microsoft. One thing that I recommend for folks, especially when you have uh a bunch of different projects or different experience, is that you want to try and tailor things to where you're applying to. So, if this person had eight projects, just making this up, right? So, they have three here, but they have eight in total. If they were applying to a digital forensics company that needed to work with things like recovering files and file systems and stuff like that, this would be an awesome project to call out. Why? Because to me, as someone looking for things that stand out, this would be someone, you know, if we had, you know, 50 other applicants that had similar experiences with Nex.js, Tailwind, all these things. and I going, okay, all these people seem good. That's nice, but they're all very comparable. And then boom, someone who has done something with file systems, file compression, understanding some of this stuff. Then I might go, okay, this is something that is standing out a little bit more. So, this is a very specific case because I worked with digital forensics, but I want you to be able to think about this kind of thing because I'm not saying that every single place you're applying to, you must go tailor a resume. But even if you're applying to different types of jobs or in different domains, say as a full stack developer, you wanted to apply for more front-end roles or more back-end roles, maybe you tailor your resume to have a couple of flavors of it to be able to apply to such roles. If there was a job, let's let's use the digital forensic example again. If you were like, man, like I really want that job. I've been applying to a whole bunch, but this one I really got to stand out. That might be something that you really go tailor and tried to put more emphasis on and optimize specifically for that job. So, I just wanted to mention that when we're talking about the project types and the file compression system to me stood out as one where I might go, hey, based on some of my experience, if I was hiring at that company, that might stand out compared to some of the other individuals. Developed an intuitive user interface using TypeScript, Tailwind, CSS, and HTML ensuring seamless navigation and userfriendly operation. Okay, so again, we see the technology called out and then some I guess like some fancy wording. I don't know how that's the case and perhaps it's all very obvious on the GitHub and and to be fair in these videos I'm not clicking through their GitHub and going through that and stuff. So again to convey this to the person reading the resume if the expectation is that they are going through and clicking the GitHub like what's going to make me want to go click that on the file compression system one if I were at that digital forensics company and this is something where I was like click like that really stands out to me I'm probably going to go look at the GitHub to get a little bit of an idea what's going on there but for some of the other ones if they're not that relevant to me I'm probably not going to follow up on the GitHub to dive deeper so it's almost to give me a reason why I should be going deeper on it. That might sound critical, but the whole point is that you're trying to stand out amongst others. Right? Then we see, okay, utilize depth for search DFS to traverse the Huffman tree efficiently enhancing overall compression and decompression performance. So, this is kind of a like an interesting statement, right? So, utilize DFS to traverse the Huffman tree efficiently. What makes that an efficient traversal? I think that you would want to be prepared to be able to kind of answer this kind of stuff uh if you were to get past the the resume screening, get an interview, enhancing overall compression and decompression performance by how much, how so, by what measure, right? Like be ready because if you're going to make claims like that without uh backing it up with something like I would say it might very much be true from your experience, I would just say be ready to to kind of talk about that. Overall, do the project stand out? I think it's going to largely depend on what this person's actually applying for in the first couple. Um, if you were trying to um get roles in more front-end stuff, then I would say that might be kind of um commonish, right? Nothing that's too uh stand out except maybe the integration with like Gemini API that might be like the new bar being set is to integrate with some LLM type tools. So, that could be helpful. I do think the real time collaboration part is kind of interesting. So that could stand out a little bit. But then we have something like file compression system and I was using that as an example where that might stand out in some capacity depending on the job. Okay. And to wrap things up, this person was also asking about broadening their horizons. Right? So, I think that when I read through this in terms of broadening horizons, a couple things that stand out to me are maybe finding I kind of said this earlier, maybe finding projects that you can dedicate more time to and continue to build on. Perhaps that these are, you know, for the file compression system, like why is it that you never went back to that? Or for the one that was a live collaboration one, it's been a couple of years now, like why have you not gone back to that? Right? So these are opportunities where you could be building upon what you've already been uh creating and maybe there's new optimizations or new ways to restructure things that you could go revisit. So I think that there's something to be said about larger projects in terms of the experience that you could gain from doing that. I see you know you have things like TypeScript, Nex.js, Tailwind CSS. There's there's a lot of common things which I think is great because you're able to continue to build up that experience. I might say at this point if you're like, "Hey, I have a lot of that going on and I want to broaden my horizons." You could, and I'm not saying you need to do this. This is just because the question was asked. If you want to start exploring things like either other languages that are maybe more uh focused on perhaps like back-end developments or just kind of doing an entire departure from sort of this JavaScript, TypeScript domain and that could give you some different exposure to things. And again, maybe you spin up a couple of small projects. And it's okay if they're small, right? If you're like, I want to go learn C++ because I wanted to broaden my horizons. You could go build a small project in C++ and use that as an example of here's me trying to learn new things and here's what I learned from doing this. So, you can leverage projects that way as well. But yeah, I think that's probably what I would call out is that if you're trying to broaden your horizons, maybe it's time to start looking at some different technologies, some different languages to leverage. I don't necessarily think that you have to do that though, especially if you're enjoying this kind of thing and you are getting that full stack exposure. The only other thing I might add is that if from your perspective, you're not getting I kind of called out it seems like it's more front-end heavy. If you feel the same way, then maybe try to focus more on building in the back end or vice versa if I misinterpreted this. Now, that might be a way that you could broaden your horizons a little bit. So, that's what I would recommend. I think it's great that we have at least one internship on here. That's going to very much help with getting the next one because as soon as you have some momentum, it's better than zero work experience. So, great job. And I think that having projects listed is already better than many other people have cuz there are people that have zero projects to add on to their resume. So, overall, I think this is a great start. Couple of things to improve, but I'm definitely wishing this person tons of success in their internship hunt. So, thanks for sending this in and a reminder that if you want your resume reviewed, send it into résumé[email protected] and I'll try to make sure that I can make some time for it. So, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time.