Asking a Mech. Engineer, M.S. on His Story, Resume, and Job Search

I am in software development, so my resume and job search tips might not apply to other industries. So I thought it would be fun to share the stories of my connections!

First in the series will be my best friend, Oliver! He is a mechanical engineer based in NYC and is finishing up his Master’s thesis as I am typing up this article. He was looking on Indeed, Glassdoor, and his college job site and was able to land a job in less than two months!

I am helpless when it comes to math. I failed my first math test in high school and it was just geometry. In college, I finally cared more about grades and asked him to tutor me in calculus, and miraculously, I got an A+. He is a man of magic!

How did you know that mechanical engineering is your calling? Why not another major? I remember that you were really good at coding and math back in high school.

I went to a small Lutheran Christian school from Pre-K through 8th grade. When I was in 6th grade, I had an amazing science teacher who did very fun experiments with the class.

He was very young, very funny, and made me actually want to go to his class because I felt like I was actually learning something. (Most other classes I was either not too interested in or I already read ahead in the textbook and realized I already knew most of this stuff.)

He had connections with FIRST Robotics competition, a high school robotics competition where every year a new game/objective is created and students from various schools would have a few months to put together a robot and compete at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan. He was able to enter our school into it (mind you, our team was full of middle school students), and we went up against high school students in the competition.

I was part of this team and contributed a lot to the construction and coding of the robot. It was at this point when I realized that I wanted to do some sort of science-related job when I got older. Applied mathematics, building something from scratch, seeing the process of your work as it comes along and the euphoric feeling at the end when it’s…