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7.2. Resumes

There are thousands of free resources on how to write your tech resume already online.

So I won't go into too much detail here. Instead I want to focus on the philosophy of what students often get wrong when writing their resumes.

I'd highly recommend Tech Interview Handbook's resume guide, if you are looking for a more in-depth guide.

In the future, I do plan to add a student specific tech resume guide to this chapter.

The Goal of Your Resume​

Resumes are a marketing exercise.

To get hired as a Software Developer Intern, you should write your resume with the goal of: Marketing yourself as someone ready to work as a full-time software engineer (even if you are just a student with no formal work experience).

Let's recall the list of technical skills expected to build production-ready applications from chapter 5.

  • Frontend Frameworks (Ex: React, Vue, Angular)
  • API Development (Ex: REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets)
  • Databases (Ex: SQL, NoSQL, Key-Value, ORMs, Migrations)
  • MVC Web Frameworks (Ex: Spring, Django, Rails)
  • OOP Design Patterns (Ex: GoF, SOLID)
  • Automated Testing (Ex: Unit, Integration, E2E)
  • Docker and Containerization (Ex: Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Cloud Platforms (Ex: AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • CI/CD (Ex: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Travis CI)
  • Observability (Ex: Logging, Monitoring)
  • Architecture Patterns (Ex: Microservices, Monoliths)

For each of these skills, you should ask yourself: Have I demonstrated this skill on my resume?

If the answer is no, then you need to ask yourself: How can I get this skill on my resume?

Will any student ever have all of these skills on their resume? No, of course not. If you already know all this, you are probably ready to be working a full-time job.

But if you feel like you're not getting interviews, it's likely because you are not demonstrating enough of these skills on your resume.

I Have No Experience, What Do I Put on My Resume?​

Everything from chapter 6 and any volunteer work from chapter 3:

  • Personal projects
  • Open source contributions
  • Volunteer work
  • Hackathons
  • University projects
  • Clubs and societies
  • Anything that demonstrates your ability to build software

It is your fault if you have nothing to put on your resume by the time you are looking for internships.

My Resume Is Not Getting Me Interviews, What Do I Do?​

If your resume is not getting you interviews, its probably because you either:

  1. Are not applying to enough jobs
  2. Are not presenting yourself as someone who can actually build software
  3. Have not formatted your resume correctly

How Should My Resume Look?​

Just look at the resumes of students who got internships at the companies you want to work for.

Take the resumes of students who worked at Amazon, Google, or Microsoft and use that as a roadmap for your own projects. Build the same projects, or better yet, build better projects that demonstrate the same skills they did.

If you want to quickly find bulks of resumes, checkout resume review megathreads on /r/csmajors on Reddit or find one of the Discord servers that does resume reviews.

You'll quickly see what the standard is, and how you can improve on it.

I Don't Have Time To Build Real Skills, What Do I Do?​

If you are reading this, and have NOT made the effort to build real skills through volunteering or building projects chapter 6, you only really have one option left:

You need to lie on your resume.

You might be thinking, "But isn't lying on your resume unethical?". Yes, of course, but what even really is a lie anyways?

If I follow a Youtube tutorial to build a simple application, and then I put that on my resume, is that a lie?

I didn't build it from scratch, but I did build it. I learned something in the process, and I can talk about it in an interview. You don't have to say that you used a Youtube tutorial to build it, you can just say you built it.

If you really want to push it, just write your resume without doing the tutorial and then follow the tutorial sometime before the interview.

Ultimately, if you haven't made the effort to build real skills and don't have real experience to pull from in your interviews, then you're gonna be bad in interviews and ultimately not get hired even if you did somehow make it past a resume screen.

Do I want to encourage lying on your resume? No, of course not.

But the reality is most of the projects other students are putting on their resumes are not real projects either. They are just marketing themselves better than you are.

In the thousands of student resumes I've reviews over the years, I can confidently tell you most students aren't making real original projects, they're just putting school assignments, incomplete hackathon projects, or copying online tutorials. And the reality is, there's nothing wrong with that. It's ultimately up to the employer to decide if they want to hire you or not.