The data science resume that got me my FAANG (MANGA?) job (entry level data scientist)

recruiting season is in full swing my friends it is a season of late nights of sequel reviews lead codes and trying to remember what exactly baze is but before we do any of those things we first have to land the interview which some would argue myself included the hardest part of the entire application process and the single most important thing in landing that interview is the resume i've been popping my resume here and there so today i'm finally going to sit down and go through in detail the resume that got me my current position as an entry level fang data scientist i'm the kind of person that's pretty hard on myself so you won't hear me say this often but i'm actually quite proud of this resume it's the result of countless iterations and many many hours of work be warned though it's still not perfect and it still has a pretty big but not super obvious error in it that i'll point out later on now let's go through this item by item line by line my resume is one page long and very ats friendly as you can see it's also very conducive to cramming it in there as much as

possible header here we have my name and email phone number and address these are clearly not my real phone number and address but it is my real name and email it's separated by simple bars some people say that having the address is pretty old-fashioned um these days since nobody is actually gonna mail you anything except for like the spam people and the government but as my friend and fellow youtuber kenji pointed out it's still really good to include the city that you're in so the company will know if they need to fly you in or not you can also put in your github and linkedin but i personally chose not to because i noticed that applications ask you to put in your github and linkedin anyway

education and honors so honors used to be spelled h-o-n-o-u-r-s because i am canadian and i still abide by the laws of her majesty and queen of england but now i spell it without the you to show that i have truly assimilated into the american culture i was doing my masters at the university of pennsylvania and here's a pro tip if your program has a bit of a convoluted name like mine which is masters of computer and information technology just put down what it's closest to which here in my case is computer science and then put the actual name or acronym in parentheses i actually started doing this after i've gotten questions from recruiters asking me what exactly my program is another thing that is useful is to list out all the classes that you took in that program that are relevant to the job data science statistics was a funny one actually i swear i wasn't going to graduate because that class was intended for people with a very strong math background for context i've done like two intro calculus classes a couple statistics classes for a science people and an intro discreet math and probability class i didn't even do a linear algebra so this class was incredibly hard anyways i also listed out my undergrad degree in pharmacology and the scholarships and honors that i received this section actually evolved from me just listing out the names of the scholarships until i realized that nobody actually knew what it was for so now i put the dollar amount and why i received it

professional experience is the meat of the resume it's also where i spend the most time iterating and perfecting it to get to where it is now first item is goldman sachs so right off the bat i'm going to mention something that i did that looking back i probably wouldn't do now the title of my internship was actually technology summer analyst since this resume was specific to the thank data science position i tweaked the title um to something that related more to what i actually did at a company since most technology summer analyst positions are for software engineering i have a whole video talking about how i got in as a software engineer and just asked to work on data science which i'll think about i thought that changing the title would emphasize more the fact that i was doing data science machine learning but i think that might have come off honestly it's a little bit too trihard and just like a tiny bit deceptive if i were to do this again i would just leave it as technology summer analyst and trust that whoever is reading my resume will figure out what i actually did based on the bullet points in this internship i worked on data science machine learning the high level overview was that banks needed to maintain a certain amount of liquidity or cash on hand at all times per regulations and the task that i was given was to figure out a way to do anomaly detection so that we could be alerted or better yet preemptively know when we might not have enough liquidity or too much liquidity this way we can make better preparations and be faster to act when we know that the amount of liquidity is going to change so following the structure i always talk about first bullet point is overview what i did second build a point is the technical stuff and the final bullet point is the impact the final product of what i did was used unsupervised machine learning algorithms on time series data for anomaly detection that reduced processing time that was a mouthful so the technical stuff is that i first had to get my data using scala and wrangle it etc and the way that i showed it was impactful is that the results were interesting enough that i was asked to write an executive summary about it and presented to senior leadership so my bullet points follow the structure of overview technical and impact but what i did to elevate it even more was to thicken more quantifiable impact wherever i could for example reduced process time by 20 and 50 500 plus end clients and of course the last line was all about impact in terms of executive summary and presenting it there's three lines here but there's actually way more going on in terms of keywords and showing and not just telling i was working the big data i'm not gonna go into too much detail here because the video would literally be like 30 minutes long so i'm gonna make a separate video that goes into all the details on how i turn this not so good resume into my current resume so make sure to turn on the notifications buttons so you don't miss that out when it comes out anyways returning to this specific entry this internship was the star of my resume and i milked it as much as i could my other work experience is a research position at the ontario institute of cancer research which is a cancer research center near the university of toronto where i did my undergrad i took out this full-time research position after graduating and finally accepting that i wasn't going to be a doctor because a i hated all the doctor activities during my several clinical volunteering positions and b i would have been a terrible doctor probably largely because i would have hated it anyways so for this position i wrote junior data scientists here to desperately emphasize that it was a data science position looking back now i probably would have just put research assistant because that was the proper title of my job i actually had quite a few different research positions but this was the most data sciency one the most recent one lasted the longest and actually had something published by the time of me writing this resume before i got my intro chemical massage this was the star of my resume and i milked it much harder but in this version i simplified things to just get a brief overview of what i did which was discovering three new cancer mutations between python and r i also put in the two publications one of which was still in preparation and other that was published if you're still in early stage and are trying to get your first internship you also want to stay tuned for my other video where i'll be going through the resume that got me my goldman sachs and amazon internship offers and in that resume this experience was featured a lot more

skills this is just a summary of all the different keywords i sprinkled throughout my resume as well as others that i couldn't manage to casually incorporate i organized it by programming language big data machine learning and data science and miscellaneous technologies where in the last one i just kind of threw in everything else i used big data here because i wanted to stick that keyword in my resume looking back now though i probably will organize it a little bit differently but i think this is fine the way it is here too final section is projects and

leadership this is where i show all the other impactful things i've done and also keep emphasizing that i don't just sit in a corner and code by myself all day which may or may not be true but oh well first entry is teaching assistant not so much to say here i was a teaching assistant for math class and i work with other tas and the instructor to do ta things clearly i had to work with other people so i must be somewhat sociable um with what i'm trying to convey here i stuck in some qualifications here but honestly a bit of an overkill to be honest probably would have just left out the 60 plus students now co-founder of business lead for tally so this is my failed startup that i tried to package it up and show that despite the fact that it failed it wasn't a complete failure and i had to have had some communication teamwork and leadership skills okay so i was part of the accelerator program at the university of toronto and a few of us wanted to build a platform to help students with autism and adhd by digitizing this behavioral therapy that helps these students do better in school i was mostly in charge of the talking part and by the end of the accelerator program i definitely improved a lot in my talking skills i pitched weekly and convinced the private therapy provider to agree to give us money for the product if we managed to build it which we didn't but in general this is a really fun experience although i did lack a lot of management skills my teammates were focused on building a good product and it was really on me to do the product management and stuff but i really just focused on talking to people i didn't actually make sure that we had a great product in the end long story short it failed and i learned a lot from my shortcomings that i've been trying to improve on since next entry is president of taxpayer at university of toronto this is a university club aimed to teach technical skills to people outside of computer science and engineering so it's pretty funny because i was actually the only non-engineering student on the exact team and i was definitely learning these skills that were being taught too i started off as vice president and then became pro co-president at the end i kind of patched this up a little bit since i just wrote president i think it's okay because you know i tried playing around like vice president comma president but then it just looked kind of weird and confusing i really enjoyed this experience and actually did feel like it helped me become a much better team player and leader i hope this experience in my resume shows that my people skills are pretty good last item so i'm gonna be honest with you guys this one is like a little bit of a scam okay so yes i was the wet lab lead and i was part of the teams that did these projects and won these medals but i was honestly not a pivotal member of the exact team i was way too focused on doing research projects volunteering and just like a million other things that i didn't put a lot of effort into these projects i didn't lie about anything of course i just wasn't super involved with the whole thing tbh okay so we finally got through it so did you notice where the big but not obvious mistake was if you think you spotted it pause the video and let me know in the comments below before i tell you okay so it was that for the teaching assistant position i wrote toronto owen and april 2018 to september 2018. this is clearly just copy pasted from the entry right below it oh no i think it wasn't so obvious i hope because it was on the margins but if you did notice it it's actually a pretty huge error i think well i hope this video was helpful for all of you stay tuned for the next video on how i transferred my not so great resume into this resume and the resume that got me my goldman sachs and amazon internships