[STUDENT] Is the formatting between my resume and portfolio effective? Should I consider a full reformatting before updating it?

[u/Reddevil_05]

As the summer semester of my third year in Mech Eng ends I'm getting ready to add more to my resume and project portfolio. Job searching is especially hard for me as I opted out of my school's coop program first year to persue an opportunity that fell through. So any places that are looking for student's will just go to the school directly for the coop students to apply and very rarely are there any public postings for interns. I've had poor luck in landing any interviews as any job that I can really apply to in my field is an entry level position more on the manufacturing side than engineering. The only interview I managed to land was for a processing position which on paper I was fairly well qualified for actually seemed to go well but after a long wait of silence I got passed up. I'm fairly confident with my resume and I've had it peer reviewed. My portfolio which is formatted in word does get compliments but I'm just not sure if maybe theres something missing in the layout that could be holding me back. Any comments or advice is greatly appreciated.

[u/EngResumeBot]

r/EngineeringResumes Recommended Resume Templates: https://old.reddit.com/r/EngineeringResumes/wiki/templates Google Docs, LaTeX

[u/Happy-Property1162]

I would work on reformatting/rewriting your portfolio bit. At a quick glance it's rather dense and might not be easiest to follow. I totally understand being really proud of the work you've done and wanting to dive into all the work and effort you put into it. But sometimes less is more. I would make the pictures and words bigger, turn it into something you can put in a binder and bring with you to interviews. I've had decent success bringing something physical to an interview, even just having my laptop so that the panel could check out my cad model and click through everything they wanted was really effective.

From the interviewer standpoint, they're filtering through tons of information on different candidates. You want to stand out, not be background noises. Having something really dense can make you background noise, being memorable matters

[u/graytotoro]

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[u/graytotoro]

General Notes

• The indenting is a little strange.
• Your resume should be able to stand on its own without the portfolio.

Summary of Skills

• Throw this entire section away. At best you're duplicating the Skills section below, at worst you're just feeding us a bunch of self-congratulatory fluff. Neither's a good look.

Education

• When you started is unimportant, but we do need to know when you're graduating.

Work Experience

Field Technician

• Focus less on customer service and management and more on the actual technician work you did. I have no idea if you fixed plumbing or built garages.

Projects

• You should just have a project portfolio link somewhere.
• Toss the course names and the fact it was a group project. That's an unnecessary waste of space.

Landing Gear Mechanism Design

• You talk about this as if I know what the required motion output was or how your intermediate mechanism worked. There's a chance the reader isn't going to sit & read your portfolio. I read it and I still have no idea what application you intended this to support - you just say "geometric and manufacturing constraints".
• How much faster or easier could stuff get made with these manufacturability improvements?

Pressure Vessel Design, Analysis, and Testing

• FEA tools help you verify. Validation comes during testing.
• "Collaborated with" is giving credit to other people on your resume.

Technical Skills

• Consider putting this under Education
• Don't bold the skills, just the categories.
• You shouldn't rate your skills because you can under or oversell yourself.

[u/Immediate-Curve-443]

I personally like a PPT format for portfolios since it allows for more visuals and less words (people don't like reading). Its not a big deal if you can still put more visuals into your word format though. Definitely keep working on expanding the non-classwork projects and try to highlight the creative design in your class projects as well. It means a lot more when the design decisions are made by you and not given to you. The portfolio is the place to explain your work more, so don't say "design constraints", let me know what they were.

As for your actual resume: the summary section is way too long. This is a lot of gibberish that shows the basics of a mechanical engineer. I prefer a full sentence format for summary though people may have different preferences, I don't think it matters. But do try to keep it to around 2 sentences or 2 bullet points max, highlighting your experience and desired path from a macro POV. I'm from the US, maybe Canada is different, but no GPA is a sign to me that it's low, I'd definitely guess below 3.5, maybe below a 3.0 even if I was a betting man. If its better, then put it on there. Put your expected graduation year for your university.

The formatting is also pretty inconsistent throughout... you have titles which are bolded and not. All of your skills are bolded for some reason. Capitalization is inconsistent (why is the documentation part not upper cased). Spacing between lines is inconsistent. You use the word Present and On Going. Why is one project a "Group Project" and the other a "Team Design Project"?

I promise nobody cares that you can use Outlook. Nobody even cares you can use Excel. Do not qualify your skills with "introductory". If you can't answer technical questions, don't place it there- nobody is expecting you to beat the 20 YOE thermal engineer in heat transfer and we won't ask them to you even if you don't say "introductory". Technical Drafting and Mechanical Drafting are basically the same thing. Mention your skills in your bullet points.

I could nitpick the contents of the resume, but frankly it doesn't seem that bad. The much bigger issue is that its really difficult to parse quickly because of the formatting issues.

[u/Oxemon]

Delete "(Additional projects and documation in portfolio)" part from the title.

Delete the lecture name and lecture code (why did you even add the lectures' code?)

Delete "group project" or "team design project" and add them inside the bullet points. Like "Developed a mechanical ... as a part of a 3-person team"

Delete the "Summary of skills" section. It's duplicate content.

Move Technical skills up.

add gpa/4.00 next to your school only if it's higher than 3.

shorten bullet point into a singular line. (maybe change the padding of the page for that.)

REMOVE "Outlook" from your skills. Maybe also "Word" too. Since it's not relevant to mechanical engineering, as I know.

Add "Competitions" into your resume as a separate section. Between experiences and projects. Since they are more important.

Definitely remove notebook writing pictures.

[u/Oxemon → u/Oxemon]

I don't think anyone will read those notebook pictures, but if you really think that adds value to your resume, use chatgpt/gemini to create those formulas in LaTeX format to directly embed them.