30 Days, 30 Hacks: Mastering Your US Master's Journey

In today's incomprehensible market, crafting the perfect resume template and showcasing impressive projects are essential steps in your journey to get that interview opportunity. However, let's talk about the game changers – your social presence on LinkedIn and your active involvement in the open-source community on GitHub.

As discussed in my previous newsletters, resume and projects are your tickets to the interview room, although your LinkedIn profile and GitHub presence can be the catalysts that open the door to incredible opportunities both in terms of career and networking. These platforms are more than just digital placeholders; they are dynamic extensions of your professional identity.

In this newsletter, we'll delve into the strategies that can transform your LinkedIn profile into a compelling narrative of your career journey, emphasizing the critical elements that grab attention and leave a lasting impression. We'll explore how an active GitHub presence can elevate your coding profile, foster collaboration, and open doors to exciting projects and job opportunities in tomorrow’s newsletter.

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/maniktaneja3

Your LinkedIn profile is your digital business card, your professional showcase, and your networking hub all rolled into one. It's where potential employers, collaborators, and mentors get their first glimpse of your skills, achievements, and aspirations. It's the platform where you can articulate your unique professional story, connect with like-minded individuals, and discover opportunities that align perfectly with your career goals.

I consider LinkedIn to be one of the best platforms to reach out to Professionals (👀 no I do not enjoy blind). So, how do we optimize it? How do we make sure that recruiters see you on LinkedIn? How do we get an interview from a competitive firm without actually applying for a job?

* Let’s go through these strategies -

1. Professional Photo:

• Use a high-quality, professional-looking profile photo where you appear approachable and well-dressed. It is a networking platform not Instagram. Unfortunately we do end up posting insta/gram worthy pictures these days to have an extended reach for content purposes and I myself fell prey to it but your profile picture is different.

• Do not, I repeat, DO NOT trust the so-called “linkedin influencer\’s” profile picture, it is not advised to have a random fun looking picture on a Professional platform.

2. Headline:

• Craft a concise and descriptive headline that reflects your current position, and expertise.

• Use relevant keywords in your headline to improve discoverability. I can’t stress enough on the importance of keywords, if you are someone who has played around with NLP you might know that figuring out the keywords from a corpus of text is really the trick in identifying the context, same logic applies here.

3. Custom URL:

• Personalize your LinkedIn URL to make it more memorable and professional. It should ideally be your name (e.g., linkedin.com / in / “yourname”). LinkedIn gives you the ability to customize them, make use of that feature.

4. Summary:

• Write a compelling summary that provides an overview of your career, skills, and aspirations.

• Share your unique story, career goals, and what makes you stand out, in short, do not end up writing a SOP here.

• Use keywords related to your industry and expertise for better searchability.

• 3 pointer strategy is really good to hone, although this may or may not be an established strategy but having 3 pointers for anything makes it easy to read and gives good coverage. Since, I started reviewing resumes to help individuals, I’ve seen people include a summary section, long gone are those days where we used to fill space using the summary section, your linkedin profile is supposed to have that summary not your resume.

5. Experience:

• List your work experience, starting with your most recent job.

• Use action-oriented language to describe your accomplishments and responsibilities.

• Quantify your achievements with specific results and metrics where possible.

• THIS NEEDS TO BE MORE DETAILED AND HAVE MORE POINTERS WHEN COMPARED TO YOUR RESUME, I am shouting through text because a lot of people copy and paste stuff from resume to linkedin or the other way around. Please spend time in glorifying your experience.

6. Education:

• Include information about your educational background, including degrees, institutions, and graduation years.

• It doesn’t matter which college tier you belong to or used to, your education is important don’t shy away from sharing important details and extra-curricular achievements in this section.

7. Skills:

• List your skills and endorsements, emphasizing those relevant to your career goals.

• Arrange your top skills at the beginning of the list for visibility.

• Tip: Your friends can endorse you, it helps, also you could take up small, quick quizzes on linkedin to get that badge.

8. Recommendations:

• Request recommendations from colleagues, supervisors, or mentors who can vouch for your skills and work. Always reach out to those who provided you a LOR for the application process and ask them to write you a recommendation, if someone goes through your profile you’ll essentially give them confirmation that it was in all honesty.

• Write personalized requests for recommendations, highlighting specific projects or achievements. Always respect an individual you’ve worked with, they could be your peers or your mentors, this platform and this section has a strong impact on the overall look of the profile.

• This section, in my opinion, catches the eye of anyone going through your profile.
  

9. Accomplishments:

• Use the "Accomplishments" section to showcase certifications, publications, patents, languages, and any relevant awards or honors.

10. Projects: 

• Utilize the "Projects" section to highlight significant projects you've worked on. Include descriptions, team roles, and project outcomes.

• Provide a GitHub URL to the projects and add a 1 minute video explaining the project (both in github repository and linkedin content). Read more about projects here - https://charchaai.beehiiv.com/p/day-21 and https://charchaai.beehiiv.com/p/day-20, if you haven’t already.

Reach out to learn more - https://topmate.io/manik_taneja3 
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