Resume Critique, plz!

[Lamb_Kiki]

Hi all! I'm desperately looking for a job. So, I would like my resume to be attractive to employers. Please give me as many suggestions, criticism as possible. Thanks.

BTW, I tried to enlight my programming skill. But it doesn't look that obvious in the resume. I had very good training of C++. After that, learning other programming softwares became just a piece of cake. In graduate classes, I used a lot of R and SAS. Is that necessary to mention these in the resume? What's the chance of getting more attetion from employers by showing advanced programming skills?

[TrueCaleb]

1. I believe you left your name in the page properties. You probably want to edit that out if you want to keep your identity a secret.
2. You don't need to write "tel:" or "email:", people will recognize a telephone number or email address simply by looking at it.
3. In my opinion you wrote too much for the objective. Some people even suggest leaving an objective out.
4. I would edit your skills section. It seems repetitive to keep saying skills. List Excel first.
5. I don't like the diamonds, but that is just my personal preference. I'd say you don't even need bullets in your education section.

[MG]

Originally Posted by TrueCaleb

3. In my opinion you wrote too much for the objective. Some people even suggest leaving an objective out.

This. The only thing your objective should contain (if you choose to have one) is intern vs. full-time. Everything else is useless fluff.

[soapbox]Attention candidates! Please stop writing objectives that talk about what the company can do for you ("help me develop my skills blah blah") - if you want to develop yourself, go to school. The company is hiring you first and foremost to work and contribute, not to develop you - that is ancillary. [/soapbox]

Also, what does "Cognate: Actuarial Science" mean? I've seen hundreds (thousands?) of resumes and I've never seen the word "cognate" on a resume. It looks weird.

Finally, you seem to do a lot of "helping". You might want to bump it up to say that you actually did those tasks, not just helped.

[Lamb_Kiki]

Originally Posted by TrueCaleb

1. I believe you left your name in the page properties. You probably want to edit that out if you want to keep your identity a secret.
2. You don't need to write "tel:" or "email:", people will recognize a telephone number or email address simply by looking at it.
3. In my opinion you wrote too much for the objective. Some people even suggest leaving an objective out.
4. I would edit your skills section. It seems repetitive to keep saying skills. List Excel first.
5. I don't like the diamonds, but that is just my personal preference. I'd say you don't even need bullets in your education section.

Thank you TrueCaleb. I didn't even notice that I left my name in the file. And thank you for all your advice.

[Lamb_Kiki]

Originally Posted by MG

This. The only thing your objective should contain (if you choose to have one) is intern vs. full-time. Everything else is useless fluff.

[soapbox]Attention candidates! Please stop writing objectives that talk about what the company can do for you ("help me develop my skills blah blah") - if you want to develop yourself, go to school. The company is hiring you first and foremost to work and contribute, not to develop you - that is ancillary. [/soapbox]

Also, what does "Cognate: Actuarial Science" mean? I've seen hundreds (thousands?) of resumes and I've never seen the word "cognate" on a resume. It looks weird.

Finally, you seem to do a lot of "helping". You might want to bump it up to say that you actually did those tasks, not just helped.

Thanks MG. I also doubted whether the redundant objective is necessary. "Cognate" is the name my department came up with for the additional requirement to get a master's in stats. Each student has to take some classes in the fields related to Stats, like actuarial science, econ, biology, pure math.

[vjvj]

Your right margin looks all over the place.

Left and right margins seem wide - pretty sure unnecessarily wide because most lines either have blank space or already wrap to the next line.

The tabbing is also inconsistent from section to section.

I'd abbreviate all months a 3 letters and would lose the period.

I'd consider keeping the city & state of the right margin. I guess the reason you've done this is because you want to include the college and the line is already quite long. Most people don't include the college. I can see that maybe you want to get points for "business" as well as stats and AS. But is makes your Education section harder to read than most, so there's some tradeoff. And it seems like a pretty obvious detail on your accounting degree. I think I'd try to cut a couple lines out by tacking the GPA on the line with the major if it looks OK there. I think you might do as well or better without the bullets in this section.

You've got too much bolding. When you bold 3 consecutive lines, nothing is highlighted. Plus, you highlighted "GPA:", which actually distracts you from the GPA itself. You've got a good GPA and don't want to make people miss it.

I really dislike "various" in a resume. It always sounds evasive to me.

[asdfasdf]

I more vote against Cognate. I would probably try to avoid CUSUM, unless it's more widely used than I'm aware of. Cut "logistics, catering, and entertainment"

[Lamb_Kiki]

Originally Posted by vjvj

Your right margin looks all over the place.

Left and right margins seem wide - pretty sure unnecessarily wide because most lines either have blank space or already wrap to the next line.

The tabbing is also inconsistent from section to section.

I'd abbreviate all months a 3 letters and would lose the period.

I'd consider keeping the city & state of the right margin. I guess the reason you've done this is because you want to include the college and the line is already quite long. Most people don't include the college. I can see that maybe you want to get points for "business" as well as stats and AS. But is makes your Education section harder to read than most, so there's some tradeoff. And it seems like a pretty obvious detail on your accounting degree. I think I'd try to cut a couple lines out by tacking the GPA on the line with the major if it looks OK there. I think you might do as well or better without the bullets in this section.

You've got too much bolding. When you bold 3 consecutive lines, nothing is highlighted. Plus, you highlighted "GPA:", which actually distracts you from the GPA itself. You've got a good GPA and don't want to make people miss it.

I really dislike "various" in a resume. It always sounds evasive to me.

Thank you vjvj. Every detail matters.

[Lamb_Kiki]

Thanks asdfasdf, what about x and MR chart?

[vjvj]

I'd get rid of all the periods. They're unnecessary and technically you're tacking them on the end of things that aren't sentences.

The first job bullet starts with the lame "Worked with the director". Not only doesn't this help the bullet, it hurts. As MG said, telling what you did is way better than "helped". The rest of the bullet is probably how you view you job, but it is pretty much a generic description of a work process that could apply to just about everything. It indicates a focus on the process, which isn't necessarily bad (a focus on the process might increase efficiency), but is nowhere near as impressive as a focus on results (a focus on effectiveness).

I'd think about coming up with results-oriented bullets. What was the result of your helping the clients? Did it change what they do? In what way? How do you know that was good?

Your bullets don't need to encapsulate everything you've done in the job. In fact, one good bullet is often sufficient to get you a phone call. So don't worry about writing a bullet that presents results of work for one client, one project. Seeing a good bullet for that one client is way likelier to get you a phone call than ones that generically describe what you have done.

Some with the second bullet. "Wrote SAS code" is not very impressive.
Solving clients' problems is. If you make us think you might solve our problems (rather than just writing code), it is fantastic.

The third bullet is hurt by the end. Teaching clients is OK. "Helped" distracts from the teaching part, but doesn't really add anything the way it is worded.

And same results-oriented comment applies to the conduct research bullet. The focus seems to be on listing tools. Everything else is incredibly vague. It may be a big deal to you that it was the dept chair, but it really isn't to us. Should be "Monte Carlo simulations", I'd think. So what was the result of your research? How will it affect what anyone does?

The intern bullet doesn't need "helped". There are 3 things in the bullet and the tenses don't match. Do you mean "check" inventory or track inventory? Process is a bad word to use as a verb in the bullet because it is ambiguous in meaning until the whole bullet has been parsed. That is especially the case here when we're expecting past tense but you've used present tense. So we assume it is a noun and not the verb, which just confuses us.

I'd consider making Computing Skills its own section. The reason is that doing it the way you have has forced you to shove the heart of the bullet far off the left margin. It is less likely to be seen there when a person is scanning a resume. I'd move Excel first because it is probably considered the most important for most act jobs. "National certified" is bad English and likely identifies you as a non-native speaker. I don't know what others think, but to me the certifications aren't such a big deal because of the easy availability of braindumps for help in passing certification tests - you can pass the exams without ever using the software. If you leave them there, leave space before the opening parentheses.