Workshop On Resumes and Internship resources and links

Resources
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Here’s a short summary of today’s talk, along with all the links and a short synopsis. Any questions/clarifications/suggestions are welcome in the comments.

Resume

  1. You don’t need to put your address, family details, gender, height, weight etc.

  2. Add just one mobile number, one email ID, a link to your github/linkedIN

  3. Name in big letters, make it visible.

  4. You don’t references, career objectives, academic summary, interests.

  5. Mention your technical stack in your project, why it was built and what were the end results of deploying the project. Have a GitHub link to your project.

  6. Avoid using scales like ‘very good in Java’ or ‘4/5 on C++’. Without an absolute scale, its impossible to judge what that means. Mention tools/environments, software, languages or even particular libraries if need be.

  7. Stick to 1 or 2 pages, no more.

  8. Have clearly defined sections in your resume, education/experience/projects/awards/certifications.

  9. Make sure it converts well to word, a lot of companies use ATS or autoconvert to word.

  10. Avoid using words like many/few/some. Try to be precise. Mention awards with their name and year.

Internships

There’s many ways to get internships, Here’s the links to what I spoke about today, we’ll cover it more detail sometime later:

  1. Through sites like https://www.linkedin.com/ or https://internshala.com/ . I’ve had better experience with the former compared to the latter. LinkedIn has better features to act as a digital extended resume, and its incredibly easy to just message people and ask for internships/opportunities. Please put some thought into the message before you reach out to people though, they see a lot of boilerplate messages everyday. Use the LinkedIn Jobs feature to see for offers.

  2. Through official research programmes like SRFP: https://web-japps.ias.ac.in:8443/fellowship2020/index.html or SRIP: SRIP | IIT Gandhinagar or SURGE: http://surge.iitk.ac.in/ or NIUS: Application Form nius — Homi Bhabha Centre For Science Education, TIFR or CeNSE: Summer Program | Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE), IISc
    There are many more such programmes out there, you just need to search for them. Most of the IITs, IIITs, top NITs have official student research programmes. Keep an eye out for these in November/December/January of each year.

  3. By emailing professors. You can reach out to professors using the faculty page of their respective college website and ask them if you can work under them. This can be a very low reward process, with you receiving only one reply for 100’s of emails, you must also write a good cover letter and read about the professor’s work before reaching out to them, otherwise it wont work. Under no circumstances should you call them, except when they ask you to call them.

  4. Through hackathons: Hackathons have several startups attending, loads of people from companies and a lot of peers with good contacts. You can use sites like Devfolio: devfolio.co , Hackerearth: https://www.hackerearth.com/challenges/hackathon/ , Skillenza: https://skillenza.com/ , Devpost: New & upcoming hackathons · Devpost , MLH: https://mlh.io/

Keep all these sites bookmarked and visit them every few days, and if you find a good hackathon apply for it. Post hackathon dinners are great places to socialise, and reach out to people. You can connect with them on LinkedIn and reach out to them later too!

  1. Through contacts: Several companies and organisations like DRDO and ISRO, or even Google and Microsoft have referral programmes, so if your parents or relatives know someone who works in these places, ask them to refer you. Note: You’ll still have to put in the effort to clear the interviews, so think twice before taking the referral.

Research/Study resources

  1. If you need a PDF/EPUB of any book, Libgen: http://libgen.is/ is the best website. Just type the title or author name or ISBN, and you’ll be able to download the book.

  2. If you need research papers hidden behind a paywall, you can use Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.tw/ . Just find the paper you need with a google search, and paste the URL/DOI link into sci hub and download the paper for free.

  3. For searching research papers from a particular area, use Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/

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Some additional resume tips :

  1. If you have done projects and not uploaded them on GitHub, make sure you upload each of your projects. Start early. It gets harder to remember everything that you have done later and you don’t want to call each of your friends you have ever worked with on any project when you should be preparing for interviews.

  2. 10th grade details are redundant now.

  3. Describe your projects using bullet points instead of paragraphs.

    • mentioning what the project is
    • what the technicalities are
    • what is your and your work’s contributions to this field

  4. Include links for Positions of Responsibility/Achievements to add credibility to your work. Follow reverse chronological order.

  5. Save your resume as FIRSTNAME_LASTNAME.pdf

  6. Add a separate section for relevant coursework (like Data Structures, OOPs, Computer Networks)

  7. Try to keep your resume one-column as it looks more presentable and is easily read by algorithms used by companies for shortlisting.

  8. Good sites for building resume :

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Good point about overleaf! Mentioned that in the talk but didn’t mention it here. Although LaTeX takes a bit of work it’s totally worth it imho

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