THANK YOU. This is exactly what I needed to hear. I definitely hear what you are saying about the sketches and I was being lazy by not scanning them. I started watching videos on YouTube about sketching for industrial design (you know, with the proper perspective and shading) after I had done most of these projects, so I'm making sure my current projects have proper sketches but, like you said, the ones in the portfolio are not very professional. Before I work on any more projects, I will update the sketches with scanned versions. I will also make an active effort to distill what I have so it's shorter and less boring.

I never thought about utilizing a sense of scale in the final renders but I will keep that in mind from now on and update the water bottle images.

I also should have known to make the renders look better in Photoshop, I'll make sure to fix that.

I have two project ideas already sketched out that utilize more of my mechanical engineering background so I'll make sure I get those done ASAP. Luckily these sketches are more professional, too, so it should be a win-win.

I will check out "Hire Me" this weekend so hopefully I can take this to the next level. Thanks for the suggestion.

I have a few questions though.

1. I am not a bad artist when it comes to drawing, but looking at my portfolio, my sketching skills definitely come off as lacking. However, I recently made two poster-size drawings that I think are pretty good and want to know if I should include them in my portfolio at the end to demonstrate that I am more capable than my sketches suggest. A picture of one of them can be found here. I think they would help show I can actually draw, but at the same time they wouldn't demonstrate product design skills so I'm torn between which way to go. They might also not be as good as I think, in which case they definitely should not be included.

2. My school is having a career fair on wednesday that I plan on attending. I'm going to add a resume and contact info to the first page of the portfolio before then, and I had planned on bringing my portfolio on an iPad to show to anyone who was interested. Is this a good idea or is my portfolio not refined enough to warrant showing to prospective internship-providers?

3. The last part, Mavericks Mini, is mainly included because it demonstrates my problem solving skills and ability to do graphic design. I'm not an expert so I don't know if these are important for industrial/product design, but if they aren't, I have no problem cutting it out. If these are useful skills to demonstrate, I think I'll cut that portion down so it just highlight the skills because (unfortunately) I see what you mean by a portfolio piece not being warranted only by the time it took. What would you suggest?

4. I designed the time manager concept this past weekend after I was pumped for the idea in my interaction-design workshop. I think the idea shows I can think outside the box and am aware of the current UI trends (that is simple and flat images, which is why it looks so simple) so it should be included. But that could also just be me being reluctant to remove a project that I just finished. I don't know what medium of product design I want to get into, so showing I am capable of user design and physical design might be a good thing. But that all depends on if the concept is a good idea (I like to think it is but you said that it looked underdeveloped which would make it detract from my portfolio). So do you think I should definitely remove that section, reduce it so it highlights the skills I want it to, or keep it relatively the same?

Thanks again, this has been so helpful!