Need help with my resume, and why, despite doing good on OA's, i'm not getting any calls back?

[sudden mango]

@silk surge would love some help if you get a chance!

[silk surge]

You can remove coursework, your experiences/projects speak enough to your competencies and your coursework adds nothing there

It’s interesting that you have the SAA as an intern - but weird that you put it under honors and not certs. I’m on the fence on the fidelity program bc it’s not well known - consider bringing that and the ascend scholar up into education under honors tho. I’d consider bumping skills down bc you’re spread out

Your experience bullets don’t convey what you did for the business at all - it’s all tech. I would esp rewrite your first bullets for each to highlight your biggest feature work/product or business impact. You’re not technically strong enough to lead w tech, so it’s better to talk about application. When it comes down to the rest of your bullets, they’re ok but lacking in the same way - I expect more specific analysis/outcomes w data science interns for ex

Your externship reads a bit strange and out of place, doesn’t dive deep enough into your contribution to where it sounds a bit BS-ey (esp “scalable and secure microservices”). I need more information here before I can give you suggestions, but I’m at a loss

For Cornell DS - what kind of model? You also have oddly unrelated work mixed in, I would consider splitting them out as a project to not confuse

Your first bullet of pocketml can be made clearer, and I think you can rewrite the last two bullets to highlight less trivial things. Your social media backend is good on the basis of the tech (although the last bullet is trivial and could be improved)

You overall seem strong, just be sure to communicate digestible and relevant things for a business/layperson

[sudden mango]

How exactly can I make my bullet points under experience easier to digest, but without losing clarity over the type of tech I used?

Like I want to say that I used a lot of AWS tools during my last internship, but then I won't have space to talk about the business aspects of it. How exactly do you balance writing things that are easier to communicate, while still making sure that they see the skills you used for it?

Thanks for all the help, i'll make sure to state and update my resume as you said, but that's what I was concerned/unsure about.

The Cornell DS is a project team where we do projects each semester which is why I have like different projects, and we also have like teaching sessions where we teach students about different topics weekly. We also have corporate sponsors like Millenium which is what one of the projects i've done with, it was with them.

The externship is part of the ASCEND scholars, we are sponsored and funded with LinkedIn so they are doing a project with us, and paying us for it, hence the role extern. We are supposed to make a product to which will benefit linkedin, and the product we came up with was this linkedin rooms idea. The project is going for this whole year which is why the verbs are all present tense.

But yea, I overall guess I struggle with how I can state business/practical impact, without sacrificing the tech I used. Would it be possible for you to give me an example for like one bullet point on my latest internship to which maybe I could model the rest of my points?

Also you recommend that I split up my honors into going under the education section, and then for technical skills, you would make a new line called certifications in which I would put my SAA into?

Thanks so much for all the help, you're really kind and helpful for everything!

@silk surge

[sudden mango]

For example, here is how I managed to update my first resume experience and let me know if this makes sense.

Also, in latest first experience the one i just sent, I worked a lot with Rest API's but I'm not sure if that's needed to include on my resume bullet point items, but I would like to have the keyword REST api on my resume so I'm not sure if I should add it as a tool/framework, since technically it's not? A lot of recruiters might be looking out for it though so idk

[silk surge]

Like I want to say that I used a lot of AWS tools during my last internship, but then I won't have space to talk about the business aspects of it. How exactly do you balance writing things that are easier to communicate, while still making sure that they see the skills you used for it?

What's more important than whether you have tech is whether you can deliver value. For ex: why was it necessary to generate alerts on malicious trading activity? For me, your Kafka event processing doesn't tell me anything more important than the fact you have exposure to messaging queues - does this make sense?

The Cornell DS is a project team where we do projects each semester which is why I have like different projects, and we also have like teaching sessions where we teach students about different topics weekly. We also have corporate sponsors like Millenium which is what one of the projects i've done with, it was with them.

Here I would split unrelated projects into projects (or cut them, but your political affiliation predictor sounds interesting to me) and keep that one sponsor project focused

The externship is part of the ASCEND scholars, we are sponsored and funded with LinkedIn so they are doing a project with us, and paying us for it, hence the role extern. We are supposed to make a product to which will benefit linkedin, and the product we came up with was this linkedin rooms idea. The project is going for this whole year which is why the verbs are all present tense.

The main issue for me is that what you're doing here isn't exactly clear - is LinkedIn Rooms supposed to be a competing feature for Twitter/X Spaces? Saying it's on "scalable and secure microservices" also invites a lot of skepticism. I would prefer that you call this a feature and make it easier to understand

[sudden mango]

Okay yea that first thing you said makes sense, and that's kind of how I tried to reframe my first bullet point, and the overall first experience like i sent in that new screenshot. Does that sound good now?

[sudden mango]

yes exactly, it's supposed to be a competitor to twitter spaces, but obviously we're just a bunch of externs so it might not actually be built by us fully, but it's a nice product dev project that I feel like adds to a resume

[silk surge]

Then say that lol, and tell me what your contribution is and what you worked with - I'm assuming there's a lot of webrtc or something under the hood but it's all masked by trying to overgeneralize

[sudden mango]

yea so far i've been working with webrtc, but i can't really provide metrics for it cause it's not like in prod yet?

[silk surge]

That's fine

Metrics aren't as necessary - main focus is impact, and saying "I'm building Twitter Spaces for LinkedIn" is more than strong enough

[sudden mango]

Okay perfect. Do you mind if I try changing that and then send it to you one more time? Also, was this more well said?

[silk surge]

Like if you can lead with easy-to-digest points like that, I would be hooked onto you as a candidate

[silk surge]

Your new bullets are somewhat better, but still a bit unclear on what you did and what it was for - why is your reduction of processing time the biggest thing?

Including specific libraries is an immediate turn off if it's not relevant - this goes for any ecosystem

I'm guessing plt, pd, np are pyplot, pandas, and numpy? Then don't include it

[sudden mango]

okay

[silk surge]

So the primary question is why was it important to make it faster?

[sudden mango]

so we could have heightened surveillance to ensure market integrity. I.e if these alerts weren't caught in time, someone could be violating the market integrit and having an unfair advantage

Like if they had insider trading knowledge, it was crucial we flagged his account and stopped him from trading

[silk surge]

Maybe it doesn't sound as big to me bc I'm not in trading, but as someone who's worked in fraud and financial systems, one of the end results I'm looking for could be something along the lines of volume of malicious trades impacted over time

Bc that's ultimately what you measure success by here

At least as a firm

[sudden mango]

oh like overall amount of malicious trades we caught?

[silk surge]

If firm A had a such a detection system and automates flagging and shutting down accounts, presumably there's a bit of arbitrage that the bad actor (Mal) can capitalize on right? In other words some volume (let's say $10M / mo) is impacted by bad trades from not shutting it down early enough, so making it faster can reduce that volume from $10M -> $6M

Idk if that makes sense

But it's how I would think about it here

[sudden mango]

ohh i see, like how much money we saved the markets from implementing faster detection systems, which is that $4 million dollars. Also these get automatically flagged, but then someone (me) has to actually view these flags and then choose whether or not to like contact them and then close their accounts you know?

also we don't actually trade ourselves on our markets, so it's not like we're the ones losing money. Essentially, you can think of us like the NYSE

but for these new financial instruments ( event ocontracts )

[silk surge]

Something like that yes - keep in mind manual intervention systems are always flawed so I would consider it deeper about the actual impact your work had for the business (why was it important?)

[sudden mango]

okay, but saying like actual money value saved is a little unclear since we weren't the ones that lost the money, I also didn't have access really to how much money we could have saved, I probably could have calculated it when I had access to the redshift tables, and then just calculated how much each of these bad actors made during their times trading

But you would say that money $ is the best thing in terms of impact?

[silk surge]

It's why I used "impacted" instead of "saved" lol but yes that's objectively the only thing that really matters in terms of primary impact - you can take a guess if you need to

But again, Idk what company this is so I'm just going based off guesses and assumptions

[sudden mango]

Okay I see. I would say probably maybe around 500k - 1m overall? The thing is this is a smaller company and startup that isn't going to have that crazy high volume. Also idk how I could say it in terms of impact, because obviously they're not going to believe that an intern actually singlehandedly impacted the company in 1m overall?

[silk surge]

Well

During one of my internships I launched a feature that had a $17M eARR impact via new clients that needed this feature to onboard

So it's not unrealistic per se

Just needs to make sense

[sudden mango]

okay, and that's for that first bullet point, the why. Do the other 3 make sense?

[silk surge]

It feels like it can be made more straightforward but I have no outright suggestions atm based on what little info I have

[sudden mango]

that's about as like detailed i can say about the process without like giving company secrets out, but I hope that makes more sense