Would you kind people take a look at and comment on my CV?

[IonReactor]

It's going to be sent to professors in my department that I want to work for and I hope to tweak it as fall approaches so that I can use it to find an internship.

 

[Dale]

Determination, work ethic, and perseverance are character traits rather than skills. And the interests section belongs in a cover letter rather than in the CV. Also, this is much too long. Try to reduce it substantially. No need to list the class contents, people reading your CV will know what those courses teach.

National Merit Finalist needs to be highlighted. Move that section earlier and sort it reverse chronologically so that it shows up first.

 

[mfb]

"Aspiring Electromagnetics & Plasmas Scientist" looks odd at that place.

If you apply for a MSc position don't list that MSc in "education" in your CV.

"Skills" is just a buzzword collection you can remove. Use the cover letter for these things.

I would start the interest section (which should be moved to the cover letter, as Dale mentioned) with science and put the sports below. The last sentence looks a bit out of place.

Similar for achievements, put scientific achievements first. I'm not sure if the basketball entries help, especially the second one.

"Technical skills" looks like a list of courses you attended. Label it as such if that impression is right. "Maxwell's Equations" is not a technical skill for example.

If plasmas and propulsion are such a strong interest as you describe then your CV leads to the question why your previous work and research experience were in completely different fields. Anything recent that made you interested in it?

 

[IonReactor]

If plasmas and propulsion are such a strong interest as you describe then your CV leads to the question why your previous work and research experience were in completely different fields. Anything recent that made you interested in it?

Well, there's really no quick way for me to answer that that wouldn't just be some BS so here's the story of why I decided to go to grad school:

I really like futuristic technology because I would read a lot as a kid and the stories that described interstellar travel or plasmas always got me excited, especially if it combined the two, because of how cool the physics sounded. My head has always been in the clouds and my heart in a million different directions, and the first thing the latter wanted was to build an Iron Man suit. I spent a lot of time and energy in undergrad figuring out what that actually looked like as an engineering problem, what kind of life I wanted, and what kind of risks I was willing to take. In the end I decided against trying to pursue it any further because the part of it that I was most drawn to was the Arc Reactor, and the impression that I got from my research and legwork on the subject was that the current work was all being done on controls since no one had the technology to get the thing off of a tether.

Due to all of this it took me 4.5 years to finish my degree, which is relevant, but allow me to get back to your original question about the nature of my scientific experience and why it doesn't involve plasmas or propulsion. I applied to SULI-PPPL my fourth year of college but had an issue with one of the professors that I asked to write me a rec letter. She was the department chair and we had what I thought were a bunch of nice chats about physics, grad school, and life. So, months before the deadline, I told her my plans and asked her if she could write me a letter and help me with the process and she told me she could.

When the day of the deadline arrived, instead of writing the letter that I had been badgering and pestering her about for the last several weeks, the professor in question decided to help a student in the year before me who had woken up that morning, realized her SULI application was due that day, that it also needed another recommender to be complete, and then rushed into profs. office to beg her for a letter hours before the deadline. The prof. wrote her the letter and also took the time to send me an email 5 minutes after the deadline saying how she tried to get mine in before the portal closed but hadn't made it. Her consolation was telling me that she had shown someone my application and that he had told her I wasn't likely to get in.

So instead of getting a chance to maybe do that over the summer I went to the office of a different professor who did solid-state stuff in quantum computing and whose lab I had worked in, but not really gotten anything done, as a freshman. I asked him for a job because I thought his work could be interesting now that I knew a little about quantum, and he gave me a 4x4 Hamiltonian matrix to derive. I derived it and then spent most of that summer doing a laborious amount of algebra and suffering through a toxic relationship that had also been going on during the year while all of the rest of this had been happening. When the summer was over and the relationship had ended, and I was 6 months from graduating, I realized that because of my Iron Man Pursuits I had no network to leverage my way into a job, a GPA that was too low to help me, and student loans waiting to politely but firmly knock at my door.

I had done electrical engineering in college and liked that engineering provided a platform for me to apply all the physics knowledge that I had. Transistors were cool but I wanted to make things that looked cool and could fly go fast in a way that required me to use math and physics to do so and Aerospace was the only place for this. So, in the midst of a very turbulent time in my life where, for various reasons, breaking the lease on my apartment, going through a breakup, and having to take Stat Mech and QFT, I decided that getting an MS in AE was probably the best outcome I could hope for. I signed up for the GRE in October 4 days before it was scheduled and scored well enough that the good people at the University of Washington decided to humor my humble entreaty and give me the chance to study plasmas and propulsion with them.

To end on a scientific note, I've come across the idea that some people had to use plasmas to alter the flow fields around airfoils to improve the efficiency of an aircraft which I think is pretty cool. My dream would be to have a fusion thruster but from the people that I've talked to at UW that seems mostly academic and over-the-horizon at this stage and the economics of my education means that I need to think more short-term. I really just want to use PDEs, Vector Calculus, and Linear Algebra to make things go really fast, really efficiently without destroying the environment or contributing to genocide.