Resume Resources

A ~One Page Guide to a Better Resume

by Greg Marra in 2012

A resume is basically a way of encoding a signal (how awesome you are) and sending it through a lossy channel (writing) to reconstruct it on the other side (in someone else’s brain).

Story

Figure out what your one sentence description is, then build the resume around conveying that.

"I am an engineer with substantial design experience, and have the entrepreneurial scrappiness to make things happen."

Quantitative Results (#, $, %)

What your job asked you to do is not interesting. What you got done is. Enumerate your results, quantifying them with #, $, or %’s whenever possible.

  • "Developed latency monitoring framework for stateless Java frontend webserver. Identified and reduced latency by over 300ms on some key actions, saving millions of user-minutes per month."
  • not, "Developed latency monitoring framework for webserver. Wrote framework, tests, and made end to end latency improvements."

Gracefully Degrading Jargon

Recruiters may not know the details of your field, but you can write so that an expert gets a concise advanced description of what you did while a layperson can understand the gist of it.

  • "Developed FPGA-based LIDAR perception system using Tomkins-Bunner filtering to provide 30fps updates over RS422 to primary x86 path planning computer."
  • not, "Developed robot perception system to improve robot navigation."

Basic Info 101

Include:

  • GPA if it’s >3.0, email, phone number, personal website if you have one
  • Github link, if you’re applying for software jobs and have any interesting code there
  • Relevant courses. Translate names if needed, build your story with the order you put them, don’t include more than two lines

Skip:

  • Your home / school address. Seriously no one is going to mail you anything. And if they will, they’ll be willing to call you.
  • "Full tuition Olin scholarship."

Appearance


By the Olin Alumni Association. Contact Greg Marra. Code on GitHub.