527: At The Jellyfish Conference

Chris and Elecia talk about pushing out of their comfort zone, networking advice, adding STARs and action verbs to resumes, using rust, thermo forming plastics, soldering together audio gear, and winning awards.

If you are looking for an update to your resume or are interviewing for a new job and you haven't heard of the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result), it is a good way to formulate what you've done in a way that helps people see your impact. The Rutgers College Career Development Center has a STAR description that includes how to take your current, boring "did the task" resume bullet point and move it into STAR format and then into resume format to say "got great things done". There are lots of examples of STAR in practice (ex 1, ex 2). We mainly talked about resumes but it is very useful for having coherent stories during interviews. (Search "STAR resume", "STAR interview", "STAR engineering" to find a presentation that works for you. The college career sites are probably the best ones I've found.)

On the topic of resumes, if you don't know about resume action verbs, let us share some lists that will make writing your resume 25% less painful. Again, college career development centers have the best ones (Harvard Business School's action verb list is good for managers, Penn State has a nice set of verbs for engineering or see University of Houston's verb list for engineering.)

And on the topic of interviewing and networking, do you have an elevator pitch for yourself? A short introduction of who you are? It is really handy to have that for conferences as well. Princeton has a short write up on putting one together; UPenn has a long write up (ironic given the topic but still useful).

Will Chris be adding the Rust language to his resume? Too early to tell. He's been learning with Rust for Embedded C Programmers - OpenTitan Documentation.

Elecia has been playing with origami molded fabrics, as learned on Instructable Paper Mold Origami Fabrics 3.  The term on Instagram seems to be #plissage and it is covered in (super famous origami guy) Paul Jackson's encyclopedic Complete Pleats.

Chris has built a Colour Duo 2-Channel Colour Channel Strip Kit (a preamp with modifiable analog processing). This kit is from DIY Recording Equipment. He's enjoying working with it while recording music.

After Elecia's New Year's Resolution to apply for awards, we won a Communicator Award for Individual Episodes-Science & Technology, Distinction 2026 for a