Why am I not getting an internship? Seeking advice desperately...

I suspect it is the way you present yourself. Judging from your post, you seem pretty desperate. Don't be, there's plenty of jobs and people will literally try to hire you off the street when you graduate. Your accomplishments certainly seem better than mine, and I got a full time job pretty quickly. I'm also a foreigner, that's a little pay cut, but no deal breaker.

Try to tailor your CV to the company you're interviewing at. They'll know and appreciate that you spent the time and know what they actually do. Try to get a phone or personal meeting early. They might be worried about your English if you're a foreigner, and if they can talk to you in person and see that your English is fantastic, that's one problem out of the way.

Oh yea, are you in Korea, trying to get a job in the US? That can be pretty tough, as it's just so much easier when you're local. If you can, go to San Francisco on a tourist visa. You're not legally allowed to apply for jobs on that visa, but everybody and their mom does it. Just lie to to the border control guy. As soon as you land, get involved in hackathons, meetups (meetup.com, search for your favorite programming languages and topics there) and so on. Do couchsurfing if you don't have money to rent a room.

All in all, there's lots of jobs here for anyone even remotely interested in writing code. Even as a foreigner you'll be very well received and offered internships and jobs. People are wary of "remote hiring" though, because you just never know just from a sheet of paper. A lot in Silicon Valley depends on your relationships with the people you know, and it's hard to get to know someone from a CV.

Superficial things (not that big of a deal, but still things I noticed):

1. Post a pdf so we can check whether you might have a problem with the format of your resume (because I hope your resume isn't formatted like in the Google doc)

2. Some of those courses you list are ones that nobody is going to care about (Econ, for example)

3. Move your Honors section to the bottom, either before or after Leadership Activities. Your education is most important, followed by experience. You should move Technical Skills above Leadership Activities, and below Projects. This isn't a set-in-stone rule - it's just that in this case, your leadership activities aren't that impressive, so the Technical Skills section is more important. The guidelines is that the most impressive and important things go first.

4. Shorten the summary for your NSF Researcher position. 5 bullets is too much IMO. Also, 99% of people will have no idea what the first two bullets are even talking about - find better ways of phrasing what you are saying. When I read about " the Chung-Ross conjecture on a Clos network by simulating different possibilities of data sizes," my brain just glosses over that. Ignore this advice if you're confident that people at the firm you're applying to will know what you're talking about.

5. You use a lot of vague action words like "Worked on," "Collaborated," and "Participated." Find better ways of saying exactly what you did.

6. There are some minor grammar mistakes you need to fix.

7. Ideally you should have your projects on something like Github, and then have a link to your Github profile at the top of your resume, under your contact info

8. Your resume should be 1 page maximum. (One page, one side).

Some not-so-superficial things to consider:

1. Have you thought about getting a personal website? You can put a blog on there (with technical blog posts), and you can put a portfolio there too. The blog posts don't even have to be that impressive - a well-written tutorial of a technology you just learned can get passed around over the Internet. I had an engineer at a really hot startup reach out to me because of my website and blog. I've had engineers at a big tech firm (rhymes with Godzilla) follow me on Twitter because of a blog post I wrote. This can be time consuming, though, so I think it's more important to have projects than it is to have a personal blog (see #2).

2. Also, it's hard for us to suggest things for you to learn because we don't know what you're looking for. When I look at your resume it looks like you have mostly a systems development background; is that what you're looking for? For example, I know I want to work in application development - so I focus mostly on web and mobile (iOS) development. What do you want to focus on?

Add English to your list of fluent languages. Normally, you don't need to since you are at a US school. In your case, due to your extensive International experience, people might incorrectly assume you don't speak English. I was hesitant to make this suggestion since it is not politically correct. But I'd rather help you than risk not being PC.

Put your technical skills at the very front. The first project you have talks about some theoretical work. Minimize the technical jargon. I work in research but even I thought you were "one of those math people". I realized you had programming chops when I saw Python and that you implemented a board game in Java. Those should be up front and highlighted.

If you can become a committer on a famous open source project that would really help. This is a lot of work so don't worry if you can't do this.

Basic HTML and PHP can be learned in a weekend. Frankly, I assume every tech person knows these things at a basic level or can learn them fast.

Maybe talk about SQL/Database knowledge. Learn if you don't have those skills. Mention git or some other source code control system.

Best of luck! Keep at it ... you are a contender!

That's a lot easier to "consume" for me. The formatting/etc on the text file is just a bit much. When I try to "review" someone's resume, I find it almost impossible to only review for content. Presentation is so much a part of a resume that I don't think you can separate the layers into "content" and "presentation layer".

Couple of things (all superficial):

1) It doesn't say that you are authorized to work. The spelling of your name is the first thing people see - and their first thought is, "Is he a US citizen, on a visa, or what?" You need to be clear about what you are seeking rather than making people guess.

2) Why are you seeking an internship? Many people seek an internship b/c they hope it turns into full-time work. If that's you, then you might want to find a way to shoehorn something in that makes it clear that you really like this company.

3) The GPA - I'd flip it around so that the 4.0/4.0 is listed first

4) Better filename - include your name. resume.pdf in all lower case shows me that you weren't really thinking very deeply about me once I get your resume.

5) "Software engineering" is such a broad term - you want an internship in "software engineering". Is there a way to make that more specific, possibly for each company's specific needs?

6) Cover letters and targeted responses matter - the resume is only a part of the entire process

Good luck!

NSF-funded research Research Programmer January 2013 - December 2013 Buffalo, NY

• Automated an experiment process of searching for a case to increase the known lower bound for required number of colors in a graph theory problem

• Emulated functions in Python modules(numpy and Sage) into C++ to run on systems without Python, leading to approximately a 40% speed improvement

• Wrote C++ and Python programs with my team that randomly generated hundreds of a special kind of matrices in a minute, with forced conditions to avoid repetition in an equivalent class

• Implemented edge coloring problem in C++/CPLEX by formalizing it in constraint programming, enabling hundreds of matrices to be tested for coloring per minute

• The paper is selected for presentation at MCURCSM 2013 conference on November

Man, I know this feeling well. I just ended a job search a few weeks ago after two months of looking. I'm hoping I can share a couple thoughts that might be helpful. While I was looking for a full time position, and I have a couple years of experience under my belt, I think these insights still apply.

First of all, how many new contacts are you making every day? When I first started, I felt pretty good about the fact that I was emailing two or three people about positions every day. When I told this to a friend who has been very successful he said that when he's searching for a new position, he tries to contact upwards of 25 people every day. While I was never able to get up to that many contacts in one day, I did get up to around 15 per day. His specific advice: "You should be emailing so many people, that when someone responds you need to look back in your notes to remember what they do." This helped me a lot.

Second, I'd like to know what exactly you're sending people. I didn't really have any success when I would just send my resume over email or submit it to a website. I found that my best results came when I emailed a person directly, told them why I liked their company, included three sentences about myself, and asked them if they had any positions available and could share some information about them. I didn't even include my resume, and I only passed it along if they asked for it. My goal was to make it as easy as possible for them to get back to me, and take the conversation from there. It's much more encouraging when you're getting a lot of small emails.

I'll admit that the process was soul sucking. But, with those two ideas in mind, in the last two weeks of my job search I sent emails to around 50 people, got around 25 responses, 10 first interviews, 5 second interviews and two job offers. I would be surprised if you couldn't do similarly well. Your resume certainly isn't your barrier. Your approach may be though.

To sum up my advice: Lots of emails that are easy to respond to. You can do it.

What I would like to say is that you do not know the audience that you are presenting this to and sometimes your name will make a bigger impression than anything on your resume.

It's unfortunate that these things still make a difference but it is what it is.

Looking at a resume such as your's and being somewhat jaded, I might think the following:

- This is likely an immigrant. - They may not speak English well and may have had their resume written for them. - I'd rather hire someone who I can identify with rather this person who could be from a foreign culture.

Now, I do not know if you are an immigrant or whether you speak or write English well. The point is that with your name and without explicitly giving the opposite impression, this is what a reviewer of your resume may think. Choosing you versus someone named "John Smith" becomes much more simpler (ie. you don't get chosen).

So how do you counteract some of this? Well, for starters, you could use a nickname for your first name. Remember this is to just get you through the door. Secondly, if you did go to school here before University, you could list your high school. Basically, anything you could put that would let someone know that your verbal and written English is great would be good.

I am not saying that this is what is stopping you from getting an interview, but there are many employers who have become very jaded by having someone come in for an interview who was the perfect candidate on paper but couldn't sling a complete sentence together due to language issues. These types of employers would rather just not take the risk, especially for an internship type position when they could just as easily pick someone else that looks more safe.