I’ve done a reasonable amount of interviewing and hiring for deeply technical jobs so I’ll throw some advice out there. I’ll use your resume as an example but hopefully the advice is general enough that others can get something from it. Most of where I’m coming from is after resumes have made it through automated searches and past HR or whoever keeps losing all the good resumes for no reason.
What I would consider, both for the cover letter and the resume, is to remember that you’re trying to tell a story. That is, the goal isn’t to mess with margins and text size to fit in everything you’ve ever done. Instead, it is to build a coherent, consistent picture of who you are (in a professional sense - keep the hobbies out unless they’re career-adjacent). In this case, sometimes less is more.
For example, in this resume I’m not sure exactly what position you’re looking for. You’re going for a CS degree, but at the same time there’s lots of mechanical or manufacturing skills highlighted. You seem to have 3 types of skills listed - data analysis, mechanical design/build and some control systems type coding. All are interesting skills - but how do they fit together into the jobs you’re interested in?
Here’s where the objective helps. Use that to tell me what you want to do. Right now, it is too generic … that’s not terrible, but it is using space that could have more concrete info. It could be condensed to “Want an internship next summer” and not lose much actual info. Take out the redundant parts - e.g. the companies already know the jobs they are hiring for - and instead state how you want turn your interesting combination of skills into a career. This gives a framework for how the reader will interpret these somewhat diverse skills against the job requirements.
For cases where it is obvious - e.g. my resume would have 100% programming / computer engineering job experience - it is OK to leave this section out entirely and use the space for useful stuff.
The other part of building a coherent picture is leaving stuff out. It is awfully temping to put everything in there, but lots of stuff is just going to be ignore. As you’re editing, ask yourself if this information adds to the story of the job you are looking to tell.
An example others have mentioned, the Office skills either need to be something unusual & related to the job you want - VBA scripting for data analysis, etc - or left out. Do you really want a job where you were picked specifically because you can type Word documents? If not, that is taking up space which could add skills that get you the job you want.
I’d be cautious about putting management under skills. That typically means people management in a professional setting. From experience, that’s way different than technical team leadership. That’s true even in corporate jobs, much less a FIRST team. Keep it in if you have e.g. managed at a fast food place or something, ditch it if you were a team lead on a FIRST team.
For things like public speaking, get ready to have an answer when an interviewer asks about it. Have a convincing story about how you’ve studied / practiced to be an above average public speaker, including who and where you presented at/to.
As much as I’d hate to, I’d also cut the team-based awards from the FIRST section. Leave in the drive coach and other individual awards, but team-based awards don’t help as much. People who know what they are will realize they’re team-based, and people who don’t might ask and then wonder why you put them instead of individual accomplishments … they’re hiring you, not the whole team.
I’m not in the field, but do engineers typically run a mill or lathe? If not, the tool list in the first bullet of the FIRST experience might not be applicable to the job you’re trying to get.
And so on. Remember - not a laundry list of everything you’ve done since you were 13, instead a well-curated narrative showing a pattern of being able to apply the skills required for the job you want.
Then with the extra space, add specifics. The goal here is to make it obvious you did the work rather than happened to be in the room while work happened. The more specific info you can add, the more obvious this becomes … just be ready to talk about the specifics in a phone screen or interview.
The second bullet under the undergrad research has me asking “what procedures”? That’s a chance to add detail to show you did something specific and learned from it.
You developed a cost-saving BoM - how much did you save? Percentages or dollars, whatever. No one is going to expect you to be saving 10s of millions of dollars, but they will be looking for you to have a feel for how much you saved. It’s a way to see if the work you did had value or if it was just playing around with numbers of a spreadsheet.
And so on.
Hope that helps.
I’ll end on the fact that a lot of this is a case where there are no right answers. So feel free to take and leave any advice that doesn’t seem to fit your particular situation - mine included. Good luck!
