#DESTROY MY RESUME

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

ashen phoenix
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March 2024 Grad, 1000+ apps, 2 callbacks, rest of the interviews were all from networking, made it to final rounds and didnt get offer.

Am an international student. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

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The first two are Non profits and I'm volunteering as a Software Engineer Part-Time

ashen phoenix
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Bump

craggy narwhal
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How does volunteer impact/help visa status?

ashen phoenix
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You are allowed to volunteer for any organization in your line of field

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As long as its atleast 20hrs/week

dense onyx
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Democratised gold investment is crazy

stiff bison
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remove volunteer
remove bolding from everything

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putting volunteer won’t get u anywhere
you have EE and CS education, your resume doesn’t quite add up to typical jobs ppl with that bg end up in

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since you’re international I’m assuming you need a job ASAP, you should take a more targeted approach

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figure out which job you can get and tailor your profile accordingly

ashen phoenix
ashen phoenix
# stiff bison remove volunteer remove bolding from everything

is removing bold a "must"? I have seen a lot of people asking to highlight specific things...
For the volunteer roles, I previously had just "Software Engineer" and when asking for referals, ppl asked me that recruiters would get confused as you would technically "already be working as a Software Engineer" if you put "Software Engineer"

Assuming EE is out of the picture, cuz that shit was useless to me, my background involves mostly Frontend and Lil bit of Backend and Blockchain. What other areas do CS students usually get jobs in? Usually ppl either work in frontend or backend or AI or maybe system architects.

And yes, I need to get a job ASAP! I'm trying to network here and there!

lime night
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There are a lot of other ways to talk about your experience without making you sound like you're BS-ing. Your overattribution and grandiosity in your results-first points make your resume a toss-out for me. This includes "democratized gold investment"

Your volunteer roles also don't help you here much because you're clearly padding your experience. I typically recommend pushing volunteer roles in projects unless your involvement is significant enough or early enough to warrant it trumping over professional experience

People generally prefer to see humble, solution-oriented, and straight to the point - none of which are present here

empty quarry
ashen phoenix
empty quarry
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Ok go on LinkedIn and ask 100 recruiters whether or not they give a fuck about it

ashen phoenix
# lime night There are a lot of other ways to talk about your experience without making you s...

Thank you for being brutally honest with me!

I get why a lot of people are not happy with the "democratized gold investment" and I would like to be on your side however the project i worked on was so much on blockchain and making gold accessible to everyone through tokenization on a ethereum network.

Few months back, I did put something simple like "Built the frontend of a Gold Tokenization Platform that led to blah blah increase in users"

Apart from that, I'm not sue how other points can be considered as grandiose when I have seen resumes that talk about making 2M+ revenue and working on datasets over 35M rows for a new/early grad and given a pass!

ashen phoenix
lime night
# ashen phoenix Thank you for being brutally honest with me! I get why a lot of people are not...

No offense, but the reason you’re able to say something silly like this is precisely because of your lack of experience here. People regularly make features that generate millions in revenue or work on large datasets - that in itself is not grandiose.

There are a lot of other red flags in your resume that come up from you mixing uncorrelated things. On accessibility - what exactly were you working on where there were 20+ weekly support tickets for accessibility? How did you measure “disabled user access”? Why were ARIA landmarks worth mentioning? Do you even know how to test web accessibility? It brings into question the credibility of your background as well as the reputation of your firm’s engineering culture (which Indians are really struggling with if you’re aiming for US roles).

As an international in this market, you need to get rid of ALL negative indicators about your resume in order to get even a chance.

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To reiterate, in your position, I would rewrite your resume from scratch - be as straightforward as you can with no BS, which you can expand on with some help from people here

stiff bison
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comes off as a red flag, so you’re better off just leaving nothing bolded - don’t let ppl make assumptions about how you view things if that makes sense

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I don’t agree with anything person above is saying too, I’d recommend the exact opposite of that actually

you need to play yourself up bigly, it’s extremely competitive

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your metrics are good I’d say most places - just stick to metrics that align with what you can confidently explain 0-100

Like your point about 2 days to 9 hours and the 30ms latency is an example of a good metric - but arbitrary metrics like “50% faster, 90% satisfaction etc.” doesn’t play well

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and yeah I’d definitely remove volunteer if you want to be taken seriously - not sure why the other person is mad but you’re definitely not padding/overplaying - the phrasing and responsibilities are well put and it’s clear that you do have momentum and an interest/bg in the stuff mentioned - most common red flag I typically see if resumes all around the place / no clear skillset

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are they giving you a paycheck? or at the very least do you think you can get a manager/someone from each of those companies to give you a referral

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it’s not ideal you’re putting the timeline for both places concurrently

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Besides the crypto stuff you have relevant experience - but yeah you need to hustle and make it work , I’d recommend first of all evaluate your situation realistically

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what area do you live in - what jobs do you see someone with similar bg get hired in - are you getting interviews in the first place

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It’s really bad

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and everyone does it so much

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it’s not the recruiters it’s your interviewer who reads your resume 10 mins before the interview or the HM who reads metrics and instantly knows the person lacks fundamentals

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show me an example of your bullet points and I can explain some examples of how it can be the cause of lots of missed rejections if you need

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also people overestimate how many metrics are actually being tracked/relevant and the logistics rarely ever add up - employed/experienced people know for example in reality it doesn’t make any sense to even track this metric - so why is the person claiming X - in my eyes tbh it has 0 benefits and only downsides

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most people are glossing over it anyway - if it all adds up then it’s not really a green signal even in the best case - because people can claim their team/dept/other ppl’s metrics

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the downsides are significant - exposes lack of fundamentals, opens the door for awkward conversations, like a super cookie cutter scenario could be:

person has a metric “I created this crud api that reduced latency by 40% and increased throughput by 100%” or a really bad one could be “scaled a service to from X to 100k users”

then the other person could ask -
why were you working on it, was it an explicit rewrite? how did you measure the seen gains/metrics? how was it previously measured? many are blanking here - and many are doing something worse - saying “I used this random new hyped thing like a rust rewrite or some random cloud provider service and we noticed these significant improvements and everyone was happy and it was a great success story”

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not everyone’s too confrontational but a more nuanced scenario could be instead they ask you - “these metrics you reported, is this for Production?”

for < 3/4yoe people or especially new grads - answering this the wrong way can be instantly a game over situation, you always want to be in control - leading the direction of the interview - focusing you’re sticking to stuff you have prepared and are confident about

lime night
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Yep, that’s also what I generally recommend

stiff bison
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The increased family therapy experience?

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seems like pretty fine basic dev/ops stuff for a 3 digit user base

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I guess if you’ve only worked in big companies I can see how that’s not plausible, ime with startups/small shops you can pretty much hit the ground running on day one and ship to prod, don’t see any red flags with any of it

lime night
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An example specific to React would be the “reduce fetch latency by 28ms using Redux” - redux isn’t a library that this kind of metric is applicable towards at all, and every team I’ve been on would throw out their resume for obvious BS

lime night
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But in OPs case, these you also generally don’t see the specific types of outcomes OP is describing

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I mostly worked w startups, so I’m more or less familiar with what startups as a whole consider plausible - in a big corpo there’s less leeway in this - but even in OP’s case we wouldn’t have considered them bc of the red flags

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Yep, this kind of thing is great forward thinking

cyan forum
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"2x increase in deployment frequency" not sure what the selling point of this is

stiff bison
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if their background was different there can be a lot of criticisms about the latency metric, here I think it’s fine though
sure if they prevented a single extra req/resp cycle they’d save at least a tcp round trip and the req/resp so anything below a 125-175ms number there doesn’t completely add up , but again it’s fine - personally I don’t think people get caught up in tech implementation specifics and gotcha’s - since everyone’s stack is so different

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I see it as they’ve used redux and seem passionate about it, it’s a green flag

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but yeah personally imo I think the impact is underwhelming and I think they need more

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a lot more

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and probably they also need to play it off as fte (unfortunately), they’re not going to get an offer with the current situation even if they have zero red flags on their resume

lime night
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I will say OP has decent metrics here and there (e.g., the DAU or the cost saving metric) and a strong project, but it’s heavily masked by the unnecessary grandiosity and issues with bullets that make no sense in an actual development setting

So the only real solution is to do a rewrite to eliminate the red flags as far as I see it

stiff bison
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have both of you been interviewing recently, either way everything is pretty level headed
all of their experiences are in by places with non toxic culture (presumably due to the nature of the work), all their bullet points align with stuff that you do in an org that’s services oriented (which most series A/B, and most depts/teams at enterprise are as well) as opposed to a SAAS, there’s a cohesive theme to the overall resume (big green flag - most are so bad/have no clue what their core value add is), the educational background is good - an EE/CS background into user/client facing app dev work is another green flag in terms of being non toxic, there’s a good balance of acknowledgement of Ops and QA additionally with their Dev experience too - and most of the metrics and responsibilities are phrased better and seem plausible/align with everything else

so in terms of “unnecessarily grandiose”/padding - this resume is actually pretty far away from that - I’m saying it again because I’m pretty confident HM’s will want to see more - people are expecting to be impressed right now - you should mention some leadership stuff too (if there’s anything good)

this doesn’t seem to me a resume content issue - I’d say you’ll have diminishing returns changing it

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because it’s good for what it is

lime night
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I’ve gotten 41 offers in the past month, including from series a-d startups, big n, and quant

stiff bison
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like have you been interviewing, what’s been happening so far - I hate saying it but I don’t see how you can make it work with volunteer on there - you should definitely see how you can make that work - you remote volunteer for sure and then you need to fix the dates too - coinciding dates does not help you

lime night
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I’d like to think I know more or less what I’m doing here lol

stiff bison
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are you a student

lime night
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No

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In my last team I reviewed about 20 resumes on a daily basis too for full stack react/ts/go

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So OP’s stack is very much in line with what I know here

stiff bison
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yeah I think it’s just different biases, you’re probably way above the average person looking for a tech job - especially if you have a t10cs bg and stuff like quant lol

lime night
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I’m from a t50 college

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No quant or faang in my background (again, mostly worked in startups)

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I am pretty close with a lot of people in recruiting and hiring managers tho, so I also know what they’re looking for more or less

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If OP is aiming for a less traditional dev shop then my opinion doesn’t hold here ig but I’m assuming that’s not really the case

stiff bison
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at any bigN or even the banks - or also startups - I’m pretty sure this is going to be perceived as low impact , maybe I’m biased towards mid/senior hiring - but I deff am really in tune with the expectations for mid level roles rn and the bar is high

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the bar is high to get into any tech company rn - realistically (probably not the case for you)

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their tech stack and experience is also a good fit for roles where they’re not going to be considered - consulting/government/series A places, so I do see it as a rough situation where they’re gonna have to make something work out

lime night
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Yea and one thing I’ve been hearing from managers is trying to filter through the sheer volume of international applicants with BS or red flags in their resumes or interviews. Maybe your background is different here and I’m not well aligned with the sector you’re in, but it’s hard for me to imagine OP passing resume screens - which is arguably the more important thing here

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Bloomberg is still pretty good, it’ll open a lot of doors for you

stiff bison
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angellist

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LinkedIn

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wellfound

lime night
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It’s hard to filter through good startups tho yea

stiff bison
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it’s the issue with everyone

lime night
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I mean yea, but intl applicants are facing a lot more scrutiny these days

stiff bison
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no

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nope

lime night
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Where/which sector do you work out of curiosity?

stiff bison
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It’s discrimination

lime night
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A lot of the places I got were absolutely not sponsoring or were heavily limiting sponsorships

stiff bison
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if that’s the logic

lime night
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Discriminating on the need for sponsorship ig sure

stiff bison
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Yeah some companies just don’t sponsor

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but if they do right, it’s fair game

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like at Amazon/Meta etc. if they gave treatment/preference for citizens that’d be discrimination - in reality it’s all nuanced lol

lime night
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Maybe they work at amzn? Sounds like the profile

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^this is true for most places I’m familiar with

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Whether it’s intentional or not

stiff bison
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there’s biases too and it’s so team dependent too

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there’s the nepotism aspect too which it’s not like it’s 100% made up

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or like it could come off that way - like an HM from Apple might think that immigrating and facing those challenges made them better - so they could even prefer hiring an intl candidate

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I think it ends up being perception issue too, like when you see everyone on the team being the same demographic it’s easy to conclude that

stiff bison
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na you’ll see a ton of it, deff happens quite a lot in places like c1/jpmc/banks and all the consulting places
at Zon/Meta/Google it doesn’t happen but looks like it does

broken stone
lime night
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Statistics are fine if they make sense, if it adds value, and if you can back it up. It’s best to orient your resume towards the business

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In your case they don’t make that much sense nor do some of them add value (e.g., the number of endpoints/tests, the “accelerated maintenance tasks”, the deployment times if you’re just using vercel). Your bullets here also don’t give insight to your work with respect to the business

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Some ppl don’t get as much scrutiny during resume review which is fine but overall the resumes that don’t exhibit red flags generally perform better from what I’ve seen

cyan forum
lime night
cyan forum
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wtf

lime night
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Pretty exhausting month but I’ve got nothing better to do so lol

cyan forum
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i'm guessing you weren't given a lot of live coding challenges or something?

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i can't imagine doing 9 of those in a single day

lime night
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I try to keep technicals to max 5 per day yea but scheduling was a pain

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Since I’m in the east coast it’d go from 8am - 8pm sometimes

cyan forum
coarse aspen
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you guys mind looking at my resume as well. I would really appreciate it!

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@cyan forum @lime night @stiff bison @prime creek @empty quarry

ashen phoenix
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Thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion. Seems like it was quite enlightening for a lot of you. It appears that I have to rework my resume from the ground up and make it coherent both in a technical and business perspective.

@lime night I do agree with what you are trying to say given your experience, but ig my bg didnt involve a lot of the traditional SWE work where you are Designing and Developing "Scalable, Resilient & Performant" systems. Also probably why I am more targeting/focused towards Client/Frontend/UI Side of things even though that appears to be a bit saturated, which is why I have started to learn System Designing and Microservices. It's also one of the reasons why @stiff bison mentioned that it could be a bg mismatch and the advice might not be applicable across all Tech jobs. I guess what you spoke about would/could be catered to the traditional new grad SWE roles but there is another side to it as well when you think of Frontend. @stiff bison, Thank you for being so kind & humble!

But Nonetheless, The advices given here by EVERYONE means a lot to me, and I will have to double down on my work and start grinding and I shall be back here with my updated resume! Stay Tuned!

coarse aspen
ashen phoenix
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Hey guys! Ready for Round -2?

I have made changes to my resume. Let me know if this is okay.
My concerns:

  1. I believe i have repeated action verbs throughout, do you think the ATS would flag this?
  2. Moved the 2 volunteer work under projects and renamed the section to "Projects & Activities". Still worried if this might reduce the experience length of the resume.
  3. Coming to Education, back home, an Engineering clg would provide a "BE" degree, a tech college would give you "BTech" degree. Now in order to make it simplistic, do you think it would be better if i changed it to Bachelor of Science to just have it uniform for US standards, I'm not sure how it is in the US.
  4. Changed the resume template to something more standard. Would like to know if the alignments are okay.
  5. What do you think of the bullet phrases now?

@lime night @stiff bison

ashen phoenix
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EDIT: Resolved the repeated action verb issue

Resume_-_Discord.PNG
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Let me know what y'all think