 I am not here to argue that my resume is good but it did give me my first software engineering internship at Amazon. So let's talk about that. This is the third video that I put out in my software engineering series so check out the other two if you haven't yet and if you have, welcome back. If you're new, my name is Josh Beasley and I am a recent graduate from Yale University where I study computer science. Now I am active duty military out in LA and I make videos about college tech and anything else that I'm interested in. All I ask if you're a new viewer, watch this video. If it helps you in any way shape or form, hit that subscribe button because I want to spread this information as many people as possible. And with that, resumes. With tech jobs I would argue the resume is probably the single most important factor in determining whether or not you get that first round interview or coding challenge. After you get that phone screening or challenge I'm really not sure how much recruiters actually value your resume. I'm sure it ties into some of the behavioral questions and stuff that they ask you but from what I've seen with tech jobs they really value technical competency over anything else but you have to get your foot in the door and a resume is how you do that. Unfortunately college Josh didn't really know what he was doing with his resume. To be honest I thought if I had a couple good bullets and like made my resume in latex so it would look all fancy that I would be good to go. Obviously that wasn't the case because out of the 20 or 30 companies that I applied to my junior year I only ended up hearing back from five but one of them was Amazon. I'm not looking forward to exposing myself and revealing this old resume and all my naivete but hopefully it serves as a learning experience for all of us and gives you an idea of what some of these big tech companies are looking for. And it took me over an hour of digging through old documents on my college Google Drive to actually find this resume so we kind of have to do it at this point. So let's start with the header block. As you can see I used my full name Joshua Charles Beasley because I thought it would make me sound more professional when in reality you can see in the email and the LinkedIn I just use what I actually go by so don't know how much of a purpose I was serving. Next I included all the information about my education which is super important. People told me that I shouldn't include my high school because it doesn't really matter but I thought that section looked really small and awkward without the addition of my high school and you know I could flex that I was a national AP scholar and had that 4-0 but really don't know how much of a deal that actually is to recruiters. Also I feel like with your first college resumes that you put out to companies it's you're in this weird gray area where you're like have I done enough in college to put this on a resume but also like I did all this crazy stuff in high school that I'm really proud of but like is that high school stuff too young or not you know prestigious enough to put on my college resume so you're kind of in this weird gray area so I just decided not to put any high school stuff on my resume other than a couple small things but who knows. Now that I'm in grad school I'm definitely getting rid of that high school bullet because it's certainly no purpose anymore and you can also see that this resume was written back when I think around the time that I was debating dropping my electro engineering major but I thought I would still include it on this resume since I hadn't you know officially dropped it yet. Now moving on to probably the most embarrassing section experience. Now this is normally where you're supposed to put all of your work experience if you have it but unfortunately mine was very limited. The big problem with getting your first real internship is that they expect you to have so much experience to get the internship when in reality it's your first internship and you don't have any experience so it's kind of a catch-22. Fortunately I had some software experience but it was really scratching kind of the bottom of the barrel as you guys can see. First off I included this part-time job that I worked while I was at school. It was probably the most legit thing on this resume. I did in fact code for Yale and the Yale community building some websites for them about nine hours a week. Unfortunately though it was all on Ruby on Rails which as you know is not exactly the most popular web framework nowadays so don't know how marketable those skills were. But experience is experience. Next is an internship that I did while I was in high school. Technically I worked with a MITRE engineer. It was through some high school internship program that we did like the last month of school when we were seniors. But in reality it was kind of just more me working on my own web development experience. Teaching myself, working with them a little bit but yeah it I co-init an internship as a stretch. Obviously that's not on my resume anymore but back then it was like any little thing that I did related to software I wanted to include. And next I don't know why I put this on here but a YouTube creator because that's what software recruiters are looking for is people that can sit in front of a camera and make them make a fool of themselves in front of thousands of people. That's that's that's a real skill. Like this is completely unrelated and other than the fact that it is somewhat unique and might be memorable to a recruiter it doesn't belong to my resume. Now moving on to the second most important section when it comes to software jobs and that is your personal projects. For me I hadn't really taken the time to build any personal projects for myself and if I had they were part of a you know required final project for a class and I wasn't going to you know put those on there. So I had to rely off of the projects that I worked on in my extracurriculars. Specifically I was a member of this club at Yale called the Yale Aerospace Association where each year you know chose to work on a different project and worked on that project for the entire year. And like to be fair it was real good you know hands-on engineering experience but to be fair I was only doing a small part of the engineering on you know a bigger project as part of a bigger team. These weren't the worst things I could have included on the resume but there's not a lot of diversity in the stuff that I worked on and that kind of became an issue when you get asked behavioral questions where you're asked about working on a team and the different things you worked on and I pretty much worked on you know the software or electronic side of both of these projects for two years. So it was kind of hard to come up with good stories but the descriptions of these these these are gold just straight buzzwords solid works arduino matlab embedded systems oh and even cosmic ray detector yeah that's what the recruiters want to see. Next was skills um this was pretty straightforward just listed all the program languages I experienced with you know even racket because uh that's useful. Classic Microsoft office experience there and uh of course foreign languages. Lastly I included a section on the organizations and leadership experience that I've had because uh I wanted to cram as many you know unique eye-popping extracurriculars that I was part of into this resume as possible and they all ended up in this section like professional magician and rotc webmaster I guess that has some relevancy but just sounds kind of lame. All I remember is that one of my friends who was also magician told me that he put magician on his resume and somebody actually asked him about it in one of his interviews so I'm like hot that's a good idea I'm gonna do the same thing um don't know how much of an impact it had never never really came up in my interview so this whole section could be renamed hey there interviewer ask me about some of this stuff so I can at least appear qualified anyways that pretty much sums up a review of the resume that got me my very first software engineering job at amazon as a reminder my instagram dms are always open if you have any personal questions or want to say hi uh so follow me there after you subscribe of course and with that drop a like on this video it helps me and supports the channel a lot more than you think and I'll see you next time