Data Science Resume Round-Up With @KenJee_ds - Episode 2

welcome back to another resume review in this episode ken and i are gonna go through some creative and really diverse resumes if you haven't checked out his channel already you are missing out on some quality content so definitely go do that uh you should also check out episode one which we did on his channel you should stay until the very end of this video because we think that the tips and recommendations that we have for these resumes can really help you elevate yours as well also we hope that we're mildly entertaining at least all right let's get to it all right so our first resume is matthew maples i think it's nicole i'm sorry if i'm pronouncing it wrong but yeah first off very pretty color scheme like really eye-catching so i really appreciate that um first thing you guys all know i check is a one page it is one page good job matthew you did good there always keep it to one page um let's see programming languages frameworks libraries looks good technical skills so

technical skills here i would um put like sub sections about what kind of skills they are they like programming skills like python or r are they data science specific ones um such as like regression and general linear models classifications things like that because if you have those out it looks a bit more professional it's easier for the person looking at it to see exactly what kind of skills that you have um and yeah with software i would just put that in with technical skills and another comment if you're going for a data science position over here there's no need to put in like adobe premiere pro final cut pro like a lot of these things are really nice and useful but i like to think of it as more like you want your resume to tell a very specific story very clearly so it depends on if you maybe you worked at stuff that's very like related to um these like adobe premiere pro like video editing software they should put in there but if not general rule of thumb is try to make it into a coherent story

in terms of experience looks good i would label that work experience or professional experience do your remote data science intern and nexus brand that's really great so you do have experience in data science already um i also really like the highlighting that you're doing here so you know to find over 10 000 stores in target market i love the quantification as well um constructed intricate sql queries so one thing is like i would usually leave out words like introvert or like very descriptive languages that make them would make something seem more complex or more just like you know fancy because honestly the person who's reading your resume they're probably a data scientist where a recruiter has seen a lot of these and when they see words like that it actually comes off as more amateurish than if you just wrote i constructed sql queries um and presentations to validate just successful products yeah um in terms of projects so this is good okay i take that back you're a videographer that's fair put in the adobe stuff put in the video editing stuff um that's relevant there yeah there's our projects really like that as well i really like how you mentioned the technologies that you use um and also you quantified it really well so really good there okay create a youtube video with ten thousand views and a new channel with zero subscribers you should teach me how to do that that is very impressive and you're founder and owner of your own personal training that's also really interesting so i love your resume i really love it so far because it's just like telling me these stories very clearly yeah they all kind of fits together to who you are as a person right like you're not one-dimensional but for each thing that you do mention you also talk about it enough for me to get a good understanding of that so i really like that um strength conditioning in turn yeah so this looks really good to me um for your about me um you know usually i still think that you shouldn't really put um and about me and just like i really wouldn't put a profile like that um but in your case i almost want to make an exception because you have so many aspects of different things going on and maybe you're about me um can really pull that together so in your case i feel like it i can make an exception to that i think it's probably better to actually leave that in there and i really like the best books to read this year so this is something that i haven't really seen before and i would never like hey you should put best books to read this year i kind of like it what do you think ken so i have a feeling he has seen my resume because that's something i also have on there um uh and honestly this resume it looks very good to me because again this does resemble what my personal resume looks like but he took my advice and does not have a picture he's done a lot of the things really well that in my video where i talk about my own resume i would say that you know i said they like don't do these things and he has 100 uh made those corrections so i agree with you on all of the feedback um i think that if i were him that the only real other thing that i would consider is having this version which is highly stylized and perhaps one that is a little bit less stylized so maybe one where this uh where the box on the on the right side is not black it's maybe a more muted tone i do like the black contrast but a really dark colors are not necessarily very traditional on resumes in general um so you know it really depends on the positions you're applying for but uh i think that this is a very strong resume from my perspective um again a little bit of that is probably influenced by how i've set my own resume up so you're welcome to compare if you like and i think that for a resume use case it's perfectly fine to replicate a resume that you like that is not something that is you know as long as you're not replicating the work that someone else has done uh i think that that's a perfect case where you can almost directly copy something that you like um and you know it's kind of hard to cite on a reference right but uh but no this has done really well uh i also like the interests i mean he talks about his powerlifting he's clearly very interested in sports and kind of the hybrid between health and this data science field and that is conveyed very effectively here in my opinion well i haven't seen your resume so the fact that i looked at this and i was like no this is really good and it really stands out to me means that you know it's good so it's not like just confirmation bias on my part so that's a good sign should i pop it up real quick yeah why not uh i'll stop sharing my screen this is a intermediary can resume review oh i definitely see the inspiration yeah so in my resume i would definitely not recommend having a picture like that um but you know as you can see the there's a reasonable amount of similarities and structure and again i absolutely welcome that um i think that having something unique about yourself as long as it ties in to the rest of the story it makes sense just as tina said i think i probably go a bit more into the about me than most other people uh because i'm not using this resume to land a job this is more for people to say hey who is ken what experiences has he had would i like to work with this person as a contracting client um but again i think that the biggest thing we'd like to think about is does this resume tell a story does it make sense how they got from point a to point b and i think matthew did a very good job of that in general agreed maybe i'll pop up my resume at some point too i've actually never done a resume of my own resume review before so yes maybe that stay tuned it might show up at some point we could do a like a cross-pollination one where you just roast mine and i roast yours and yes uh i was pretty rough on myself i think in the last one so uh where i went over my own residence so i think that that's always good i did find some spelling errors which is bad for business um in my own so again good stuff matthew we spent a little more time on yours but i think it was worthwhile because it is a very it's a good case study and it's something a lot of people can take some pretty good stuff from the first thing that i noticed about this as we've discussed before is that it is more than one page and that is something that we want to avoid if we can um but again the best way to trim this down would probably be to remove a professional summary and just start with the technical skills we've also discussed this a little bit before what we want to lead with our professional experience over our projects especially if our professional experience is a ready yeah you know a data analyst even though it's on the freelance side i think that that's uh that's perfectly fine and perfectly relevant to the data science career field you actually have a lot of really good um experience here and again you want to lead with that i think projects behind that makes sense um you probably should have education

closer to the top as well considering you are a recent graduate but from what it looks like this is clearly organized um you know this is something interesting to me where you have verbal communication taught a class of 40 students twice weekly you don't necessarily have to call that out but in this case where you're very clearly demonstrating the skill i don't necessarily i could go either way on that one i think it might be okay to leave it in this use case because you have the clear example of where you're demonstrating that skill so i i'd actually like to get tina's thoughts on that in a second as well uh but very well organized you have some good links here um overall if this were one page i think would be a very and reorganize a little bit i think it'd be very strong resume agreed so first off university of yeah toronto lot of canadians huh yeah i'm surprised you get a lot of canadians and that's where i graduated from as well if people didn't know that from my undergraduate um you got you did political science and economics so i knew a lot of people from there as well so yeah i love the um listing out your education and everything um about that so again we can move it to the top and also you can probably condense everything a little bit like you can instead of saying 2020 winter dangerous scholar you can just put that 2020 2019 you know just put it all together um and then make just like kind of condense a little bit that help in terms of your real estate of to get your resume to one page as well um in your coursework so yeah that's good as well i would just like just kind of condense everything in general i think the certificate here um oh i guess okay i can i you can leave that in there because i can see that your degree was in um political science and econ so you need to convey somehow that you do have data science experience so i think that is good um another thing is like i really love how much research that you've done and because i know uft ufc is a very strong research school so i'm so happy that you took advantage of that and just did um all that research with different professors so yeah like that really shows to people that you're really involved and you know the stuff that you're doing is actually driving impact as a data scientist um my only comment for that also just to condense a little bit you don't need to write like you know programming statistical skills programming skills such as programming skills you can just make that i always say like three bullet points um first one have a description of what you did second one what are the technologies that you use third one what's the impact that you were able to drive with whatever it is that you're doing and that usually covers pretty much everything whether it's professional experiences also if it's projects um so yeah except for that do you mind just scrolling up to the top a little bit uh taking a look yeah like everything else so see technical tools skill set that looks good to me um for technical tools i might just throw in some libraries there for python um visualization maybe use like seaborn uh matpot lid maybe some pandas if you i'm assuming you use that for skill set so when people write machine learning um i okay correct me if this is not how you feel though ken when i see the words of machine learning that kind of just screams amateurs to me because if someone goes like oh i do machine learning you know like i just feel like well if you really did machine learning you would be able to list out what kind of machine learning that you did and maybe you did nlp work right um so i would prefer to see if you kind of listed those out instead of or even like they had parentheses and wrote them down instead of just writing like machinery um yeah i agree i would say that you know if you were to say machine learning and then parentheses even at the very least saying regression classification clustering maybe you did some computer vision uh like the sub categories of it you probably want to even go a step further but at the very least i would have that i think that would that shows someone that you understand one of the most basic things about data science is like there's two easy questions that almost everyone gets asked what's supervised versus unsupervised learning and then also like what are the types of problems you face in data science and that shows in that one like you know 30 40 character segment that you understand that yeah for sure but yeah except for that i think this is a really solid resume awesome i have one last thought uh that we were talking about so you were talking about how the bullets so the overview the uh tools used and then the impact i think that makes a ton of sense i usually try to put some form of impact in the goal as well um or like the overview of the project i just think that you know we in business you're taught this idea of bottom line up front and so we want in one line if we can to say this is what we did this is like why we did it and this is the impact that it had so you can even potentially save yourself another bullet there um you know that's really it again i think this was strong and i think that we're in pretty good consensus about how andrew can improve yeah okay you guys are already gonna know first thing i check oh no it's two pages condensate one page especially canada for bachelor of math you are just starting out no need for two pages so skills looks good tools languages education um experience really like that data science in turn you know straight up you have data science experience really love seeing that data platform developer interesting and logistics analyst so i'm very impressed by how much professional experience that you have already so that's really great um in terms of

the bullet points i was just trying to condense that a little bit more um and just you know we talked about this previously so i'm not gonna like you keep harping on it just you know list out the things that are most important and you can definitely save some real estate there um projects looks good yeah like this is fine like a lot of people go like oh i need like five projects mate you really don't if you just have one or two like that's perfectly fine so this is really great that you put you know you didn't like just over emphasize all those personal projects that you did um one thing though for this project i noticed that you right here you wrote pre-processed numerical text data analysis through text memorization tf idea so this looks like a very common nlp framework so i actually don't think it's necessary for you to list out every single step unless there's something that you did that's very different from how nlp usually works um yeah because by doing that um it just comes off as a little bit like you know you don't you're not as familiar with what you're doing since you if you were you would know that this is kind of what everybody always does so yeah just a little bit nitpicky but something to consider um coursework i've never seen data types and structures before i usually say data structures and algorithms but if this is just like a new way of putting it nothing wrong with that

um and leadership activities really love that you know you're part of these clubs which means that you clearly are able to communicate with people and you're not just you know like sitting by yourself coding all day so that is always a plus in a data scientist right what do you think ken i agree so in let's start at the end where you were already down with the

coursework so i personally think that even if you've done certificates it's okay to put that under the education bucket at the top same with the leadership and activities to me i personally like to compartmentalize everything like that and it could save some space and also some unnecessary um sections on your resume there so that would be my thought is to just put some of that stuff under education it looks it makes it look like you're a lot more involved at your school to begin with uh considering the education section currently is a little bit sparse for the skills i

would perhaps put the languages above tools just because almost every recruiter the first thing they look for is can this person program in python or r so that would be the first thing they're looking at to begin with one thing i thought was interesting you said you know you really don't need that many projects i agree but i also disagree so the way i think about it is the more real work experience you have as a data scientist data analyst whatever that might be the less projects you really need to showcase so if this person especially in college students the less experience they have the more they really need to show that they can do data science through the project background so you know since this person has a data science internship they were a data platform developer there were logistics analysts they have a lot of real world experience their projects are not going to be looked at as carefully because they already have proven the work that they can do if this person perhaps didn't have that data science internship i think that they should fill that void with doing more projects so you know nothing is ever really black and white but i think that is you know if you're thinking about okay how do i give myself the best opportunities you have to think about okay where are the weaknesses in my resume or myself as a candidate and how do i fill those with additional or external work and we will go on to chaitanya this is another resume that i believe to be very visually appealing it is a single page i really like this is super small but i really like the dotted lines to separate the sections i just think that looks really nice this is the second one that we've seen in this series where we see the keywords of the tag style and again i enjoy that i think as long as it passes the screening systems that these companies use then it is perfectly okay we should probably link or experiment with using one of those systems one of those resume checkers in a future video just to show people what that looks like i think that would be very effective there's very good experience here um you know masters in i mean education sorry masters in computer science bachelors in engineering a lot of really strong projects but as we can see there isn't any real work experience i would change this section like we talked about before to project experience and if i was chaitanya i would do everything in my power before i graduated from school to try and find research opportunities or internships that is going to be the biggest single thing that will help them land a position after they graduate so you know i think that the only thing this is missing is the work experience or i'm sure there are some other things that tina will point out um but that can really be expanded upon also the coursework i would just throw that under the education up here because that's where people are going to be looking forward in general right well you guys can see that what really canada enjoys is dotted lines yeah that's the aesthetic uh but yeah kidding aside though i feel like this is really a very aesthetically pleasing resume um being passed through ats and like this is really great just enough stylization for me to be like oh like you know this is catching my eye but not enough if i were like super convinced like a very like traditional person i wouldn't be like oh no you know there's so many colors here so that's really good um yeah like you know this is exactly what you're saying about like projects if you don't have that much experience to emphasize that so i definitely this is like an example of that so i definitely agree with you on

that one um emphasize your projects especially if you don't have any experience i actually uh what you were saying about research experience completely agree you're in school right now i like you know pretty much harp on this continuously the best data science experience if you're in school is a research position um made an entire video about that so yeah completely agree um i would say like for the projects that you have here uh let me see i would try to just emphasize impact a little bit more especially since you don't have any um professional experience like your projects if you can get them to seem more impactful like they actually did something where they you know allow someone to understand something that would really drive home the point a little bit more that might be difficult i understand but that's something to keep in mind if you can um let's see so in terms of skills and tools is good fields of interest i don't know if that's necessary because your field of interest is going to be whatever you're applying to which i assume is going to be data science um coursework yeah i would just throw that with education and also with additional skills i don't really think that's necessary as well i can't also talk about this for previous resumes you're supposed to be really like showing these skills through the things that you've done um either like you're part of clubs where you've done like experiences with that's part of your projects um so yeah like just listing out that you're good at problem solving results oriented enthusiastic and you're good at debugging it doesn't really mean that much to me um because you're just telling me that and i don't really see it yeah that's all i have awesome you know one thing that you'd mentioned of making uh talking about value add something i've had a couple conversations about recently are doing just front ends for some of these projects so having a little app a little toy scenario that people can click on and click through that shows them that you have the user in mind for any of this data so that that's something that might require a little more technical work but that really goes a very long way one last thing related to this is that uh you know

you can show additional skills through extracurriculars so if you've done volunteer work if there's a you know if someone had causes they cared about on their resumes like let's say you know i i'm very sensitive to autism awareness and i put that hey that's one of the things i'm passionate about like what person and what reviewer in their right mind is going to be like you know this person cares about charities or they care about something i don't like that person right no one's gonna say that um and i'm not saying that you should like game that in any way but if there are things that you care about there are things you're passionate that you know you spend your time in certain ways you should share that especially if it could be interesting to a recruiter give someone a little bit more context around yourself yeah for sure awesome back to you this is a cool resume i'm sorry that was like me like you know like it wasn't a disgust it was of like appreciation that was like oh my god oh i'm used to it all right um you know what this is very similar to my resume so that's like uh um interesting so in this collection we have something that's similar to ken's and there's one that's similar to mine now this is kind of pretty much high structure of mine um but yeah let's see education northeastern bachelor of science draxel bachelor of science okay cool so it looks like you transferred cool drexel to northeastern i almost played golf at drexel yeah it's in i think pennsylvania i was at you pence i was right next to drexel walk by their campus every day drexel dragons i think yes dragon skills and

relevant coursework so that looks good python i really like how you actually emphasize what libraries that you're using so you know you're not just like putting python up there um r that's great sql tableau looks really good to me relevant

coursework i would just stick relevant coursework up where education is at because that's probably where you did your relevant coursework even if it's certificate that's fine as

well work experience brought into mit and harvard very impressive i used to do research and you know that is not easy to get so very impressed by that um extracted interpreted presented data so don't live therapeutics so like um here's the thing what i know abroad institute is but if people are people who don't know our bodies in two years can do you know what broad institute is nope yeah so if you don't know what that is right it's really important to actually emphasize um in your first either like as part of your goal or part of your first bullet point of what is it that you're doing right like so why is um what is it that you're even trying to accomplish and then go into the nitty-gritty talk about your you're like exactly what you did you extract interpretive presented data um and you use a graph graphpad prism in excel and all these different tools so that really helps this person looking at your resume to immediately know what's happening um yeah merc and code pretty impressive yo this is like is this my resume this looks like my resume before i went to grad school it's very like there's pharmacology i did pharmacology as well so um yeah like this looks good i like how you said immuno oncology drug pipeline so the only thing that maybe can you can speak to a little bit later is if you read this is it too jargony for you because to me it's like very obvious because that's my background but what if it's to someone that isn't in that background um medical school that looks good so lots of research amazing over there affiliation and leadership that's really cool as well it shows that you're able you're actually involved in the school and you can communicate with people and you can work with other people so that's really awesome and also you have um leadership experience which is always really good to see and honors in awards and as well as hobbies and interests i like it i mean that's i don't really have that much to say i think this is a really solid resume what do you think i agree i think that this is very strong um you know there's a couple just small things that people should think about when they're they're you know writing the skills or something like that so when we're talking about pandas numpy things like git um a lot of the times i don't think they're supposed to be capitalized um even if we're talking you know because the way that we write them programmatically they're case sensitive um that that's again very small but if you're thinking about oh that from a programmer perspective i think most programmers even when they write about these things they keep them in lower case i could be wrong about that but um very little touches like that might be interesting to a recruiter especially if they're really heavy on the technical end you harped on the work experience especially the broad institute i from the description here i don't know like the value of the work that they did you know what was the greater goal was it to um you know i just don't have enough context around what that project was around yes they're doing some basic data manipulation data analysis but for what purpose you know is it to help improve some sort of health outcomes was it uh you know what was the research they were working on uh for that uh professor for that phd that that's something that would mean a lot to me and i'd like to understand it myself i really like the affiliations and leadership i think that those are our nice touches those are very important i mean you talk about saying oh i have leadership skills uh if you're the director or board member of something that immediately puts you into that category right

and then the hobbies and interests i personally really enjoy seeing these things on the resume and um a cool has some pretty awesome ones a student pilot competitive dance meditation instructor those are all things that in and of themselves can start a conversation you know um part of thinking past the just getting the interview process and getting to the interview is i would say at least a third of the interview is just being able to converse with the other person uh making sure that they're interesting that you'd want to work with them and having good story points like that is very important one thing i will say at the in the harvard medical school um one i don't know if there's supposed to be an e at the end of ensemble so that might be a slight typo it could just be something that it you know i'm that's not how uh that's correct and i'm wrong about that but we just do we want to be fairly careful especially with uh technical stuff of spelling them correctly i would have known this if you asked me this maybe two years ago now i don't know but yeah so in terms of the jargoniness yes this is very jargony um i don't know what half of it is um but for the most part uh you know the resume and the structure is good enough that i really wouldn't care too much what it was uh my biggest thing is just the broad institute understanding what that research was for would be a lot more valuable to me yeah and if you're applying for something that's biology related which it seems like your entire resume is about so there's actually no problem with you being targeting because the person who's reading your resume will know what those terms mean yeah i agree 100 all right i think that's our last one isn't it yeah that was awesome hopefully this is useful you know this kind of drink from the fire hose approach is going to be useful to some people who are watching this trying to improve their resumes i think we saw some really strong resumes in the session and we also saw some very consistent patterns of how people could improve yeah for sure we also got a glimpse of ken's resume so there's an added bonus remember don't copy my resume uh because there's a lot of things wrong with it only take away the good things from it well i thought it was really good i didn't even see her so perfect thank you awesome well until next time tina