Projects, Projects, Projects
🎄 No experience? No problem. 🎄
It’s not fun looking for a first job or internship. To get one, you need experience, but to get experience, you need the job. A common piece of advice is to take unpaid gigs, but if that doesn’t work for you, projects are your best bet. But what makes a good project and how do you even start one? We’ll lay out some best practices to get you started.
Project Basics
A project can serve a variety of purposes, but today, we’re going to focus on projects that help you land jobs. These projects exist to help you stand out as a candidate, showcase your passion for a role, and gain additional experience outside of traditional class projects.
A great project doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are some questions to consider when starting a project for the first time:
The project’s purpose: what problem are you trying to solve?
The project’s design: what steps did you take to make it happen?
The project’s results: what did you accomplish?
Sound familiar? It should, because like anything else that goes on your resume, you should be able to form a story out of it. You want a project that made you think critically, that actually forced you to grow and become better at something. Interviews are all about story-telling and a great project is a great story.
Project Purpose
This is where it all begins. Your reason for building something is almost as important as the thing itself. You wanted to make something to help your community, to solve a problem you’ve struggled with, to challenge your understanding of a craft. A project’s purpose will explain what’s at stake and where your interests lie as a candidate. It’s the mission statement of your product and why it should exist outside of your mind. A good project purpose will keep you motivated as you build the project and help you stay problem-oriented (falling in love with the problem you’re wanting to solve) as opposed to solution-oriented (falling in love with a solution that may not work). Maybe you want to teach coding to kids in your hometown or help students on your campus purchase used goods from each other. These are great project purposes and will keep you focused as you build.
Project Design
A project’s design is everything that you did to achieve your goal. How you design and execute your project our dependent on the skills you wish to develop and the roles you are recruiting for. A design student, for example, may wish to showcase her use of the design-thinking process to build out her project while a computer science student may want to use her project to learn a new programming language. However, there are a few things everyone should keep in mind as they build and execute their project:
The use of data: in almost every position you can think of, data is used to make decisions. Collecting and using data to make decisions throughout your project build will undoubtedly help you in the long run and make a good impression on anyone listening to your story.
Using frameworks: industry-standard frameworks, like the design-thinking process stated above, are great tools that companies use to develop their products and services. Using them shows that you’ve done your research on a specific role and can communicate in an interviewer’s language. They also help you build a more thoughtful project, as these frameworks are used for a reason: because they work.
Overcoming obstacles: how you resolved a conflict or problem will almost certainly be asked during an interview, so if you’re building something with others, document moments when things didn’t go your way or when you had to persuade someone to do something.
Seeking feedback: the thing that you build will never be perfect. As you build, talk to others and get their feedback on what you’re up to. Ideally, get it from someone that already has the job you want and write down what they say. If your project was built for a customer, interview them, and get their thoughts to improve your product.
Project Results
Your project results are everything you accomplished up until this point. It’s everything from what you learned to the impact your project had on others. A great project has quantifiable results. It shows a tangible effort and outcome. This is the final note in your story and will determine whether a project belongs on your resume or not. How many kids did you reach with your coding lessons? How many of them had a good time and will continue coding? If your project doesn’t have a quantifiable component to it, I would consider thinking of a more involved project or adding the project to a portfolio of other small projects.
Finally, and while this might be a little cheesy, the best projects are the ones that make you a better person. They introduce you to lifelong friends, teach you something you never thought you’d learn, and take you places you never thought you’d go. They become more than a bullet point on your resume and transform into stories you look forward to telling anywhere.
This is all high-level stuff, but hopefully, it’s got you thinking about how you can start building something or even improve something you’re already working on. On behalf of everyone at Seed, we hope you have a great winter break and we look forward to sharing even more with you next year!
Resources of the Week
First Round Fast Track - A mentorship program for minority startup founders
Firstly - A mentorship program for first-gen college students
Internships of the Week
First Round Capital - Community Intern (SF)
Reddit - Product Intern (SF)
Tesla - Software Engineering Intern (Spring ‘21, Fremont)
Box - Software Engineering Intern (Redwood City)