[thelist] resume

Sean German ethanol at mathlab.sunysb.edu
Thu Nov 11 17:23:45 CST 2004


Bill,

Isn't putting together a resume fun?  ;)

Like any project, keep the main goal in mind.  With a resume, the goal is
not to get you the job/internship.  The goal with a resume is to get the
interview.  An internship may not have an interview, in that case you want
your resume to inspire the decision maker to continue on to your other
supporting documents.  If a decision will be made on the basis of your
resume alone, well, then it had better be a good resume, hadn't it?  =)

This is totally non-responsive to your question, but the resume should be
one page.  This goes for college students, professionals, lesser gods, et
al.  Presume whatever job/internship you're after will inspire a flood of
applicants.  You're lucky if you get someone to look at page 1 of your
resume; going over to a second page is just a waste.  If you do include more
than a cover page and a 1 page resume, assume no one will ever see that
extra material (unless it is a requested supporting document).

To respond to your question, here is how I displayed skills on my resume.  I
included the table with 3 columns: Application, Examples, Experience.  The
rows look like, 
	Development Tools		CSV; Source Safe; Visual Studio
4 years
	Database			MS-SQL 7, 2000; Oracle 8i; ODBC
5 years

It's short, simple, to the point.  It's easy for someone to scan quickly.

It may seem a little light, but it is not the focus of the resume.  To have
a skill is of relatively little value to most employers.  What they want to
see are accomplishments.  The focus of the resume are those accomplishments,
the demonstration of those skills.

In that area a good resume will lead you through a good interview.  For
example, one of the bullet points on my resume--oh, by the way, go read one
of the many studies on how people read the web.  Resumes are read the same
way.  Or rather, not read, scanned.  You want short sentences and
paragraphs.  Lots of bullet points.  Get to the point quickly.

Anyway, one of the bullet points on my resume is, "maintained company email
service and implemented security policies."  Each bullet point has a
corresponding speech, a short 3-part story (intro/challenge identification,
body/assessment, resolution/implementation) you can whip out at any time.

If I'm asked about that specific point from my resume, or dealing with
viruses, or a time I took initiative on a project, I'm ready with a little
ditty about the time I was working at a company and took the position of
administrating the email system.  

The company got hit with an email virus once.  I assessed the system and
discovered the previous admin was blocking viruses by filtering emails by
subject.  This system fell short on two counts--virus-spreading emails could
only be blocked after the fact, and this only worked if the subject of the
infected email didn't change.  I determined the email system could block
email attachments based on file type, so I implemented a policy of blocking
all emails with executable attachments.  The company did not have any more
issues with viruses spread through email.

The meat of your resume should be accomplishments--in the case of a student,
possibly assignments completed.  After all, how do you know you have those
skills if you haven't actually done something to demonstrate it?  Each
accomplishment, assignment, skill demonstration is a bullet point with a
corresponding short story.
 
I answered your question in there somewhere, didn't I?  ;)

Anyway, good luck!



Sean G.


> -----Original Message-----
> Hey,
> 
> I am a college student and I am getting together a resume to 
> submit for internships. I don't want a programming job, but I 
> was wondering how I should display those skills on my resume. 
> If anyone has a good copy of their resume which aptly shows 
> their breadth of technology skills I would be very thankful 
> if you could send it to me.
> 
> -Bill




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