#3rd year Canadian undergrad applying for internships.

19 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

high sierra
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I put my phone number on my resume, but should I be expecting any phone calls before someone contacting me first through email etc?

I'd prefer to have my phone on silent mode unless I am expecting a phone call. Random notifications and spam calls are a huge distraction.

Is it worth my time applying to US positions that don't explicitly state whether they sponsor or not? I am a Canadian citizen.

Not sure how I would describe my projects better. For example with my interpreter project, I'm not sure if I should elaborate on the design choice of using the visitor pattern in the implementing my parser. Might that be too much detail? (maybe that's something to be reserved for talking about during the interview)

Also all my projects for the sake of learning things so they don't really have an "impact narrative" or much to say about metrics I think(that's probably an issue in itself in a sense lol).

How much marginal value would I get from spending time further improving projects vs leetcode?

I'm not very motivated to tackle any significant project right now honestly.

OTOH I've been spending 1-2 hrs daily on leetcode for about half a year now, and I enjoy it a lot nowadays.

So ATM I'd rather spend my time mainly on leetcode but if my resume could be improved significantly it would feel a bit silly to spend all my time on just school/leetcode while never passing the resume screen.

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I'll be taking Operating Systems, Software Design, and Database courses this coming winter semester.

Should I limit the # of courses I list in my resume? I already decided to omit mentioning my Theory of Computation course in my resume because it didn't seem that relevant for most positions(though it was extremely relevant for my interpreter project, so maybe I should put it back in lol).

My expected graduation date is based on assuming 8 months of internships + 8 months of school left(my school is rather flexible so I more or less mix and match when I want to do the two 4 month trimesters depending on whether I land an internship or not)

Would it favor me to change my expected graduation date to be earlier? At the very earliest it would be 2023 Sept since if I graduate with 0 internships it's just 8 months of school.

shut steeple
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  1. probably not but its usually customary to have
  2. yeah why not
  3. ur projects look like youtube tutorials/text follow-along tutorials anyway IMO.
  4. leetcode probably gonna help in the shorter term in terms of job hunts, making projects where you are learning real life skills will help in the short and long term
  5. yeah should be like 5-7 courses max
  6. meh depends, putting ur grad date earlier just means you will be put in for full time roles. So just depends on what u want personally.
high sierra
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thanks for the feedback. I guess for projects I shouldn't bother further padding my resume with mediocre ones.
Maybe just focus on LC/school until I have something I'm genuinely interested in and is somewhat novel.

That isn't to say that I didnt have a lot of fun with the interpreter project. But there was a lot of hand holding in the textbook http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/ for it.
Right now I'm going thru the 2nd part of the book where you redo the interpreter in C and also make a compiler for it too for efficiency.
Other than that, I'm trying to add additional features like a ternary operator, or maybe even arrays. That is just for the sake of exploring, but I wonder if it would make the project stand out at all?
It's not like the ppl spending 5-20 seconds reading my resume can discern what's been made by myself vs what I just followed along for, so I'm doubtful abt that.

shut steeple
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i did it in 5-20 seconds 🙂

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namely the yelp clone and sorting visualizer are all very common projects on a lot of resumes

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and i dont nearly look at the same volume of resumes as recruiters and/or hiring managers

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so if IM catching onto very common projects, then imagine those who do look at resumes full time 😉

high sierra
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indeed lol the sorting visualizer and yelp clone were from youtube tutorials.
also I guess I could wrap the intepreter's REPL mode into a web-app, that might turn out to be way more complicated than expected but we'll see

shut steeple
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“the sorting visualizer and yelp clone were from youtube tutorials”

exactly lol

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very easy to tell

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u should use what learned in those tutorials, which hopefully you did and didnt end up just following along word for word, snd try to create something of your own.

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doesnt need to be the next instagram or the next google search engine but

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i do not advise folks slapping youtube tutorials on the resume and trying to make it seem like they did it all by themselves. Especially since, again, theres too many of these projects on resumes. Furthermore, you are more likely to actually digest and learn something when trying to create something YOU want to instead of pausing and unpausing a youtube tutorial so you can follow along.

shut steeple
high sierra
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well i had to implement the quicksort and insertion sort myself, and also the implementation for the animations in general too because I wanted to present it in a different way. But again there’s no way to show a credible signal of that fact 🤷‍♂️

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i guess this is where usage metrics come in. an app that actually answered to some need and have users would have been genuine since users wouldve used the first app that did so lol

shut steeple
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not every app needs to have users, surely it would help, but its not 100% necessary. But at the end of the day, the actual content of the sorting visualizer isnt as good as ur lox interpreter and yelp clone even tho those are from tutorials.