You don’t have an internship this summer

and everyone you ask is telling you to do side projects and beef up your resume. They’re not wrong but how you do that… well, that makes all the difference.

Most people would find some tool or technology they wanna learn and go look up tutorials and follow those. I know I’ve made my fair share of e-commerce websites and IMDB clones.

But looking back, this is just a form of instant gratification that doesn’t add anything substantial to your mind or your resume. I’d usually forget most of the things I recreated from those YouTube videos or Medium articles a few weeks later and when it came time for another personal project, these tutorials would become a crutch as a starting template for me.

Let me give you a piece of advice

I’ve realized after countless weeks of wasted effort over the past few years. Forget these small isolated projects that are a dime a dozen and go check out what people in the roles that you want to get into are actually doing on the job.

Replicate those as personal projects! 

What better way to show a future employer that you have what it takes than doing what’s expected in that role?

Ok I know I probably just broke your mind so take a second to sit back and let this idea sink in…

Back with me? Cool, here are a few more reasons to add to your thoughts for why this is 10x better than the previous approach:

1. This will be challenging and train you to think and research much better than any “follow along with the starter repo below” video or article will

2. You’re going to learn how to use the components in tech stacks together in a way that will prepare you for industry

3. Your resume will stand out and showcase tools and technologies that usually aren’t found in college and personal projects

So do we actually do this?

A ton of LinkedIn searches across industries, companies, and similar roles to what you want.

I’ve found that about 50% of people (give or take) put the exact things they’re working on in their experience sections. Go find a few profiles that list them and pick out the ones that interest you.

Here’s two examples for someone interested in backend software development:

There’s also quite a bit of range in the reproducibility of industry projects like here with the second being much easier to recreate as an individual than the first.

Looking at the tools used in the second one, say you were trying to learn how to use MongoDB. Before reading this, you would go make an ecommerce site (basically a rite of passage for every CS freshman).

But now that you’ve found a real world project using it, you’re going to look into what Splunk is and how to use Flask. Then you’re gonna create your own instance of specific workflow and throw in some dummy data and figure out how to connect all these pieces.

In this process, I promise that you will learn much more than you initially intended and have a legitimate understanding of tools the average college student hasn’t even heard of (in this case, Splunk).

If you’ve made it this far,

first of all, thank you and consider subscribing to this newsletter if you wanna get more of these amazing tips for students, interns, and/or new grads.

And as a token of my appreciation for doing that, let me give you a little bonus tip that can really take this to the next level. Send this person that you were inspired by a “thank you” message telling them what you did and share some of your learnings or takeaways.

Everyone loves hearing that they were able to make a positive impact on somebody and this can even open the doors for future conversations about other projects or even a referral.