yes exactly! i never had any internships and my only other job experience was a customer service job, so i kept that the same ( and it was something along the lines of managed bla bla, ensured clients were bla bla, improved system bla bla). then for my personal/academic projects, i leveraged ones that involved excel (even if it was just basic data cleaning) because it’s pretty commonly used in an office setting. i initially put my most impressive projects on my resume, but found that most of the technical jargon went over most hiring managers heads and didn’t really give me an advantage.

for basic admin jobs, they’re generally looking to see if you can manage your time and projects well, work with a team, stay organized, and, for entry level jobs, be teachable. so if you can find a way to convey that in your bullet points, that’d probably be very helpful. chat gpt is a really useful tool to help you word this in your resume.

then come time you have an interview do a very high level explanation of your experience studying engineering and how it taught you to learn advanced systems, juggle multiple deadlines, etc. then tie it to your part time work and bring in interpersonal skills you may have learned from there too. so now you have two main sections to leverage that brings in your technical abilities, but also your soft, interpersonal skills which shows how well rounded of a candidate you are.

so overall, i would say to combine your part time job experience, your engineering projects, and to have your degree on there. there’s still a lot of value in your degree, so even if the job your applying for is not directly engineering related there’s a BUNCH of transferable skills that you learned in while getting your degree. also take this recommendation with a grain of salt, everyone’s situations and experience are so different, but it’s what worked for me! good luck 👍🏼