The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

Hi,
Does anyone know how thoroughly facilities look at your resume? I'm an incoming freshman with not a lot of research or professional experience. I'm majoring in mech engineering and have a few projects. Just little pistons and mechanisms made out of wood and DC motors. Should I set up a free GitHub pages website to hold my projects? It's pretty easy to set up. It would be like a little portfolio with pictures/vids/labs. I would link both the website and the project links in my resume. Would reviewers actually take the time to click on the link and check it out? Would this improve my chances at all? Is there a better way to go about this?
Thanks!

From my experience, they don't look closely at your resume. They look at your major and how far you stand out against others in it. If your major aligns with what they hire, that's good enough for them. It's not like they're trying to offer you a job that fits what you're good at.

Oh and a note about the small things...if your resume is written in some form of TeX, government computers might not be able to even open it. I was told that they couldn't even view mine lol. I figured out after working here that it was more of an issue that many of these employers simply didn't know how to open a PDF...

It will depend on the facility. In my resume I noted things like proficiency with lua scripting and I was asked about that in the phone interviews. How i used it, how flexible I found it, etc. They did not just read the entire resume, they used parts of it to relate to other skills. For example, "In places you have used Lua, what other language would you use if you swapped and why?" It was definitely an interview style question.

Your student organizations and any projects (like capstone) are useful too. They commented on those and noted I had leadership experience in a previous interview (I had 3 phone calls with them in different stages). So they may go over the entire thing or they may just browse basics. Your degree is the biggest decider of things, because if they do not need your major, that team will never get past the major.

Good luck!