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This is a page for avionics members to list out resume and career tips!

First off, feel free to reach out to your avionics lead if you want to meet 1-on-1 for resume advice or a mock interview or even simply resume advice. Your sub-team leads and team lead will always be willing to help you out, and you can gain a lot of meaning from getting feedback from peers on your resume. This will be a page that gets updated as time moves forward, and hopefully it can be a great additional resource for your professional development!

Things to consider:

  1. What is the culture of the company you are applying for and what skills are valuable for the role?
    • Your resume should be tailored to the company you are applying to and the specific job posting.
      • Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin want to see ownership on your resume. What were YOU 100% responsible for? You should be able to talk about the parts of the project you owned in extreme depth, and be able to answer any question possible about them.
      • If you are applying to a SWE role, your resume should not stay the same as if you are applying to an EE role. Use detailed terms in your bulletpoints (i.e. "STM32", "designed in Altium", etc.) to get past the ATS checkers for the specific role that you are looking for. For example, a software role probably doesn't care if you know how to use OpenRocket.
  2. General Stuff
    • You should not have more than 4-5 bulletpoints for each experience
    • Class projects generally do not make you stand out, since everyone else in your class probably did a similar project. Unless your project was far above the level of everyone else's, a club project or research experience is always more impressive.
    • Your employer unfortunately does not care what your hobbies are. If they are curious they will ask during the interview, but on a one page resume every line should be used to convey technical ability.
    • Your resume should be one page only. In college you do not have enough experience to warrant anything more, and recruiters do not have the time to read through two pages of fluff.
    • Do not make up statistics just because you think you're supposed to. In a technical round you will be asked about how you "increased efficiency by 25%", and if you didn't really do that they will see it from a mile away. It is better to represent yourself accurately and honestly, and trust that the right job will come your way.
    • Represent your technical achievements at a high level. In other words, do not specifically say "Wrote a function that wrote 8 bit values to a configuration register over SPI for the TMC429". Instead, think more along the lines "Wrote custom driver to control the TMC429 motor driver over SPI in C". They will ask you about the details in the interview-- use the space to include more high level ownership.
    • Keep your bulletpoints short. Each one should not take up more than 2 lines.
    • Start bullet points with action verbs. "Owned", "Led", "Executed", etc.

Notes on making connections:

  • Coming soon