How to be persuasive applying the STAR approach on your resume — Jessica’s Career Tip of the Week

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Career

The application of the STAR approach on your resume will be one of the most important tasks that you complete during your time here at ASU. Whether it is an academic project or past internship experience, you can accentuate your past experiences by highlighting the situation, task, action and result (STAR).

See some examples of how the peer career coaches applied the STAR approach through their own academic projects or past internship experiences for their prospective engineering specialties. 

Major: Mechanical Engineering
Class Project (MEE 342): Wind Turbine Gearbox Design 

Situation: 

  • Principles of Mechanical Design is the culmination of mechanics and stress analysis for Mechanical Engineers
    • Synthesize knowledge learned about free body diagrams, internal forces, the resulting stresses, failure criteria, and material selection and roll it into one process

Task:

  • Design a gearbox for a hypothetical wind turbine where team is given requirements and loading from professor

Action:

  • Organized team’s effort with weekly meetings to delegate tasks and discuss any questions we had
  • Performed full design analysis on input shaft with theory from lecture and Matlab to assist with calculations
  • Iteratively designed shaft diameter to check that calculations converged to a value
  • Shared results with team members so that the system comes together
  • Drew images of shafts in PowerPoint to help with visualization

Result:

  • Wrote a report to detail design process and calculations
  • Addressed design requirements to convince sponsor that our final design is suitable
  • Received an A on the report for a successful design and sufficient work to back up decisions

 

Major: Industrial Engineering
Summer Internship at MUFG

Situation: 

  • Designated to understand and document a new technology for visually processing positional and departmental tasks

Task:

  • Tasked with the generation of an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for a specialized section of emerging technology for new users

Action:.

  • Analyzed the new technologies by documenting toolset functionality, lessons learned, and mistake proofs
  • Documented troubleshoot instances on glitches and functionality issues vital to the uses of the technology and processes
  • Held meetings with supervisor and technology IT specialist on troubleshooting errors

Result: 

  • Generated a PowerPoint SOP for new end-users when the technology is ready for deployment throughout the company
  • Integrated the document into an overall modular series for onboarding new end-users on the entirety of the emerging technology

 

Major: Computer Science
Software Engineer Summer Internship at Microsoft: Engineering Insights Project

Situation: 

  • Collected large amounts of raw data on engineering projects and needed a way to easily take it and calculate desired metrics

Task:

  • Designed and implemented a framework for gathering and calculating metrics that provide insights on engineering debt

Action:

  • Utilized C# reflection and factory pattern to write reusable, maintainable, and testable code
  • Expanded existing Cosmos Database to hold the calculated insight metrics and implemented a data client to upload and retrieve information from the database
  • Constructed a Power BI that connects to the Cosmos Database and displays the formatted metric data
  • Wrote documentation and aided team members in utilizing the framework to implement their own metrics

Result:

  • Decreased manual calculations and improved overall engineering satisfaction

 

**STAR examples were provided by peer career coaches Keene Patarakun, Lauren Monroe and Ty Elias.