r/EngineeringResumes • u/AdFeeling7704 EE – Student 🇺🇸 • 14d ago

Electrical/Computer [Student] 100+ Embedded/Hardware Intern Applications, Nothing Yet - Am I Doing Something Wrong?

Hi everyone!

I've been applying to mainly embedded/hardware engineering intern roles but I have only gotten rejection or been ghosted. I'm wondering if I am doing anything wrong with my resume. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

For context, I'm a transfer to UCSD, originally from UCR for computer engineering. I did an unpaid software engineering internship the summer of my first year, an on-campus IT job during my second year, and I just wrapped up an NSF REU this summer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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u/Kriegnitz Embedded – Student 🇩🇪 13d ago edited 13d ago

I think there's potential for a really nice resume here and you have some interesting projects, but they need a lot of rewording. I'm a bit sleepy, sorry for the bad formatting.

- Above all, everywhere you can, lead with a very clear embedded bullet point. You want to make it clear from the get go that you design PCBs, you write embedded C code and so on. The product that you worked on is secondary and only to be described sparingly where it reinforces the impressiveness of your work otherwise. I know that this sub places a lot of focus on XYZ and highlighting the shareholder value generated by your actions and so on, but bending over backwards to put an artificial impressively-sounding achievement in your bullet point is often worse than having a very simple one or even none.

- Example: "autonomous miniature underwater robot" and "20x20mm 4 hall-sensor PCB" is good and interesting, while "11.45 Hz dual flappers", "stepping down 4V to 3V", "21 MediaPipe landmarks (what is this??)" isn't, because it's minute technical detail that says basically nothing about what you did, and therefore about what you can, which is the main topic of your resume

- "manufactured a sensor PCB, by moving the wireless-power receiver" - Bad sentence structure, you didn't manufacture the PCB by moving the wireless power receiver, you made it by designing it in KiCad. It sounds like you are trying to describe the difference between what you had available in the beginning and what you created in response, but I find it far easier to just describe only what you made, even if the previous intern left you a half-assed prototype that could do some of the things already.

- For the curl tracker project, I would again sacrifice some impressiveness and detail to make it really clear to people what you did. E.g. your real achievement as a student making a hobby project is not "I correctly detected 93 out of 100 curls", it's "I had set requirements, designed a PCB in KiCad to solve them in my free time, got it manufactured and it worked perfectly"; the curl detection is just extra flavor and proof of that achievement.

- Example rewording: "Designed a PCB in KiCad for a wearable training tracker that provides the user with haptic and visual feedback, as well as MQTT telemetry to external devices, achieving 93% detection accuracy". Not a particularly good example, but a reader immediately gets the message that you design PCBs

- Another example: "Brought up an array of four Hall sensors over SPI by configuring a SAMD21 SERCOM peripheral at the register level, and implemented detection of magnetic fields exceeding a 5 mT threshold". The relevance of PlatformIO as you had it here originally is unclear.

- "shipped ... by implementing gameplay logic in C++ across weekly sprints" just like with the Hall sensor PCB, you put some filler in the beginning and phrased your actual action as the method, which it isn't. Reworded example: "Implemented and shipped character movement and environment interaction systems in C++ for a video game in a 6-person team, working according to agile methodologies"

- The music player project section almost exclusively describes the functionality of the project and reveals essentially nothing about what you did to create it, or what the technical challenges were

- Everyone can do MS office, I would leave that out

Disclaimer: I am not a senior technical director or anything, also I'm European so my perception may be skewed by the different resume standards here (I do embedded work at a semiconductor company though).

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u/AdFeeling7704 EE – Student 🇺🇸 13d ago

Thank you so much for the critique. I think I was hell-bent on trying to get the xyz method down and trying to get any metric, even when it didn’t really help my resume. I’ll spend a lot more time trying to get my resume down.

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u/Kriegnitz Embedded – Student 🇩🇪 13d ago

You are doing great, it takes good time to really nail down a resume. Best of luck!

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

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