Resume Critique Please - Software Developer Intern

god_of_thunder

Please critique my resume. I am going to use this for a Winter Internship Career Fair in my school.

Thanks for Looking

Essendon

Not a bad resume. Certifications should go just before/after education, not at the bottom. How's Experience and Technical Experience two different things? Id just have one section saying Relevant Experience. This should be ok for an internship position.

mikedisd2

You have an RHCE and listed it at the end? As mentioned, put your certs at the top with Education.

Either lost the Objective or cater it toward something a potential employer would want. 4x words stating your wants doesn't cut it.

Work on the formatting; subtitles in bold, section titles to the left, indent bullet points, etc.

mikej412

I think the objective is fine. You want an internship while you're in the Masters Program. And the first thing I did after reading that was look to see if you the qualifications to back up your desire.

You're in a Master Program at a "name school."

You have your undergraduate degree and work experience.

The Relevant Experience looks like course work for your Masters Program -- so you should probably just list your projects as part of your UofC Irvine Education section.

A lot of college students with no work experience use their course work within their education section in lieu of work history and job experience to impress a future boss. Since you're going for an internship, a "student resume" with the school projects under the Education may work best.

Then you hit them with the knock out blow of real work work experience.

The skills at the end to fill up space is fine.

Definitely move your certification up into your Education Section or Create a Certifications sections that follows your Education Section. Put the full official Certification name (and common abbreviation) -- one per line, most impressive first. Keep it simple so it doesn't slow down or distract someone from hitting your experience.

It wasn't until a 2nd or 3rd scan that I noticed your experience was "just" 4 or 5 months. You do want someone to spend more than 10 seconds on your resume -- and your experience helps serves that purpose. It also gives you a step up on your competition for the Internships who don't have any industry experience or undergraduate internships.

If you still have room, you can keep the "Additional Information" section and mention the Asterisk PBX. You never know what might interest someone -- and Unified Communications can involve a bunch of software

god_of_thunder

Thanks for the critique mike; Will update it and put it up soon.

god_of_thunder

New draft with modifications. Pdf didn't fit here so uploaded it JAN2011 techexams rev1 - Doocu.com

mikej412

If the projects are part of your coursework, they should probably listed under your coursework list. Because of the dates I'm guessing they're part of your Masters coursework...

Maybe "ongoing support for the process of" rather than "ongoing support of the process of." It helps if you actually read your resume out loud to someone else, but reading it out loud to yourself might work too.

Maybe add the range of dates for your education. If you're currently enrolled, you'd list something like Aug 2010 -- Present.

For a degree already earned, you may be able to get by with the Month/Year earned, but for consistent formatting you'd probably also stick with the range (unless the B.E. took you 12 years to earn and you want to obfuscate that fact )

Is that Software Engineer in the bold font your job title? You want to be consistent in your resume. If that job title is bold, why not the company name too? Then your Educational Institutions and degree should also match that formatting.

I'm on the fence about listing your GPA. If it was a 4.0 (on a 4 point scale) then you have nothing to lose. But a 3.3 on a 4.0 scale gives someone a reason to toss your resume -- or the idea to look for someone with a 3.6 or higher GPA. How does your GPA compare to your classmates?

It does look like you have some room to tweak the white space between sections. See if you can bullet point your coursework so it stands out more -- but without going to a 2nd page. If there are no companies looking for Unified Communications developers, then you might be able to give up the Additional Information section (and the mention of Asterisk) if you need that space. If you know there will be UC development positions, leave it in.

You do have a resume that should pass a quick glance inspection -- and hopefully get that 2nd longer look.