Engineering Portfolio and Portrait – Summary Page

If you are reading this, you must be considering me for a position I’ve applied or are considering working
with me in a project. I wanted to write this letter because I want to be more than just a few pages on a
resume, a set of work histories or a few skill sets. I think the decision makers on both sides of an
employment opportunity want to make good decisions that lead to success

I graduated Georgia Tech in 2011 and have since then been doing a lot of contract work in various
different companies

1) Introduction
2) What do I want to convey in this in bullet points
a. Who I am
b. What I can do for you
c. What I want to be able to get in this thing I seek
d. My greatest weakness

3) Dscuss in detail

Strategy 2

1) What I want my reader to feel – I want them to know exactly who I am and what’s important to
me.
a. My history – where I came from, who I was, where I started, where I have been, where I
am now, where I want to be.
2) Objective of this letter, a claim I want to make
3)

My name is Dennis Chen, my profession so far is best characterized as a Research and Development
Design Engineer specializing in products within the medical device field. This is the summary page for
an engineering portrait and portfolio document that I have created and attached herein.

The overall structure of this portfolio is summarized below

1) Statement of Intent & Strategy – Outline the motivation, objective, and strategy of this
Engineering Portfolio and Portrait
a. Motivation – explain why I am creating this extensive portfolio
b. Audience -
c. Objective – what I need to be able to accomplish for the audience… know who I am
beyond my education, experience, know the truth
d. Strategy
i. First and foremost, I am an engineer, so let’s talk about what it means to be an
engineer to me, end goal, is this the type of engineer you have working for you?
You want to have working for you? Or you don’t want to have working for you?
1. First principle thinking, engineering principle guidelines…
2. Consider creating an engineering principle work sheet to outline the
primary engineering principles utilized in design, problem solving, root
 cause analysis, etc, which shall be my reference point upon which I use
engineering principles to guide how I do thngs
ii. , description of the perfect environment… of the perfect place for me to want to
belong to…
iii. Discussion the place I see myself in, what role I want to play, either right away
or in the near future through natural career progression….if I am in an
organization, what role do I play that would be best fit and where I can generate
the most amount of value….what do I enjoy doing the most…. How I can help
the organization the most…. If I start my own business, how do I see myself
bring value to the product or services which I generate… this section needs to
talk about why the skill sets I have below allows me to be placed into a position I
really want to be in and provide immense value for a team….
iv. Upon Establishing the philosophical definition of what being an engineer is all
about, let’s talk about My specific skill sets – break the resume down into key
skill profiles, Design, Quality, Manufacturing, Reliability, Research/Models,
Design History Files, Design for Six Sigma…
1. Where do my skill sets currently fit into being the engineer who’s
working on the type of thigs I want to work on
2. What do I currently lack
a. I think this point is extremely critical, I don’t need to over-state
how important this is but I need to describe it with a lot of
details and thoughts… this is my growth, and this is what I do to
do more than anything else, what I lack is what I want….
3. To also talk about leadership skills, the idea of how to impact change in
the organization… how to inspire people to want what you want… to
understand how to get to a place where we all want to go….
4. I think the key of what I want to communicate is,
a. The most important thing in our career, maybe the most
important step, is to find a group of people who care about
something doing something good as much as you, and you work
together with this common goal in mind, to really create value…
that is a career, that is a place where you find family at work…
that is where you find joy in the day to day….
b. Want to find people around you who can tell you you are wrong
because my wanting to learn, my desire to be better than I am
now
v. Talk about my strength as an individual contributor, as a team member… why is
my presence there useful to the overall team, why is someone like me, when
placed in the right place, going to have an impact. Focus the nature of the
statement in relation to the environment in which I’ve defined…. The closer I get
to be placed in that kind of culture and environment, the more I will be able to
produce… the more I will be able to help and do….
vi. Talk about my weakness - talk about some of my characteristics that made me
a mis-fit, some of my problems which made me socially awkward… I don’t
 follow things like football, baseball that a lot of people enjoy, I still play video
games when I get a chance… social misfit matters…. It made me less socially
aware, which lowers my emotional intelligence…. Sometimes I couldn’t read the
environment in a conference room well… being able to belong socially matter a
lot and not doing so well in that area made you an odd duck…. What matters in
terms of being part of a team is that you need to be. Some of my past mistake
was to completely dismiss this. While I still believe, doing what I want to do has
nothing to do with these hUman BS, however, I cannot do what I want to do
alone and I must allow myself to change to accommodate strong team mates, to
be emotionally aware and intelligent, to understand how they feel, to try my
best to belong….
1. The most important thing here is the goal…. The goal defines culture,
culture defines respect, respect defines the rest of people that work in
this team…. We all strive to be the one respected… it is important to
everyone. How can you be in a place where no one cares about you or
respect you.
2. The problem with the term work life balance is that it indicates and
suggests that somehow work isn’t part of life, it’s counteracting life. I
would argue that work is life and life is work, and “life” is also LIFE with
a strong component of work built into it. Work is about joy, about
sense of accomplishment, fulfillment, about feeling validated, feeling
you’ve done something intellectually satisfying, maybe even you’ve
helped people. The key is that it’s not just about work that is in service
of life outside work, that attitude is intrinsicly problematic. Yes,
sometimes they overlap and challenge one another… that is a problem
of time management… a personal lack of skill, not an attitude problem…
a. The key here is to not demonstrate my need for over-working
myself, which is somewhat true, but to demonstrate an
attitude, that is separate from a time management portion of
work life balance, which is you need to treat the 8 hours or 10
hours you are at work with a sense of duty, joy and need to
actually do things, not to use that time in service of yourself and
your life outside work….
b. There’s too much personal gain, personal benefits, personal
needs, when we talk about work lie balance and that is
inherently problematic.
vii. The discussion of strength, weakness, technical skill sets, leadership skill sets,
lack of each of these, will need to be in reference to the defined environment,
culture, which is driven by the goal and vision of the company…. And how the
leader in the company organize this…
viii. Overall, the strategy needs to start with an overall definition of objective, which
is to find a place. This definition of place must be well defined in terms of the
who, the what, the goal of the place, the attitude, the vision, the view. Etc
Once this place is defined, discuss technical skills, the strength characteristics,
 the weakness characteristics….discuss things like work life balance in order to
demonstrate my strength and my weakness…. To provide a technical profile of
who I am as an engineer, to provide an indication of what I still want to learn,
and what I want to ultimately construct, discuss that learning not only what to
do, but how to improve the method, strategy with which I execute is even more
critical, the ultimate manifestation of experience is the construction of a self-
invented transferrable strategy, which takes in the good and get rid of the bad,
and create a true strategy and guideline that is not intended to stipulate or
dictate, it’s flexible….
ix. My overall strength and weakness discussion must be tied to the overall
placement of objectives, and strength is about being humble and objective and
weakness is about focusing on understanding, admitting, no pride, and to come
up with strategy to improve, to understand that to want to improve, the first
step is to realize why In order to accomplish your goal, you must feel the need
to improve…
x. The problem with an incorrect environment is that it creates problems for
myself as well as for those that work with me. Misunderstanding tend to arise
because we are moving in different directions. What is a good example?
xi. Technical skill summary needs to also have a culmination of purpose
1. What if the ultimate design capability is not only about generating a
design, which works well, at six sigma level, but also to be able to fully
control the transfer between what engineers can control, to what users
care about…
2. Describe the systems in which I’ve developed which fully demonstrate
how well I work…
3. The technical summary page must be more than just a list of what I can
do, (which is just my resume and in that sense I probably won’t list it),
but I want to write out how these are connected and how they flow
together in my mind at the level of an entire organization.
4.
2) Statement of Break Down the Resume – Summary of Engineering Capabilities, Skill Sets and
Accomplishment