Portfolio Feedback Please

[Mitch_NR]

Hi guys,

I'm soon applying for a game developer position. It's a job in C++ 2D programming, because I'm still in the process of learning about 3D programming.

Here's my portfolio: www.michelcarroll.com

Could people please comment on my portfolio's content, resume, qualifications, presentation, etc..

Be honest!
Thank you

[kbaxter]

I didn't really look at your projects, so I can only comment on your resume. I think you should be able to condense it down to one page without too much trouble, which makes it much easier to scan and read quickly.

I would remove the hobbies section, and maybe the community service section. Those are great if you need to pad your resume to fill a page right after graduation, but you have enough experience that it's not necessary. The "Floor Worker" position is also irrelevant at this point, as is your high school education. The rest I think you can condense a bit. Don't be afraid to use a smallish font on a resume!

The bullet points under your programming experience jobs feel a little weak to me. Things like "Interacting with clients" and "Problem solving and identifying solutions" sound sort of generic. I'm not very good at writing them, so I don't have specific suggestions, but you want to find descriptive and action-oriented ways to describe the things you worked on. Maybe find some other resumes to look at as examples?

I would also consider making a more professional sounding email address to list, even if it just forwards to your hotmail address. If you're a member of IEEE, IGDA, or ACM, I think they all provide email forwarding and can be great for your resume. If not, yourname@gmail.com could be a good option.

I hope that's all useful feedback and doesn't just sound like I'm tearing your resume apart!

On another note, don't limit yourself to just 2D programming positions! There are plenty of projects that use a 3D engine for most of the graphics, or have enough programmers that most of them don't need to deal with the 3D graphics at all. I'm working on a 3D game in Unreal, but as a UI programmer, almost everything I do is 2D. Most of the other programmers on my project don't do anything directly related to graphics at all, so none of them really need to know much about 3D programming.

For pretty much any programmer, I recommend learning linear algebra, which I didn't see listed under "Mathematics and Physics" on your website (also, everything on that list is math... where's the physics?). MIT OpenCourseWare has a great free linear algebra class with video lectures here.

Best of luck!

[Mitch_NR]

Thanks KBaxter! This kind of honesty is exacly what I wanted.

I'll definitely look at that linear algebra course.