For Tech Students
Most of the student resumes, especially right after graduating, are very similar to each other. For an employer or head of HR, it is very hard to classify these resumes, especially when they receive hundreds of them. The price of recruiting employees is also very high and companies want to shorten this process as much as possible.
One of the best ways for your resume to be selected is by differentiating it from all the other generic resumes that employers usually get.
How to be different ???
There is a large number of students graduating from technical universities and are majoring in fields like software development and software engineering. While there is a huge demand for intermediate, and especially senior developers, for graduates and junior developers it is not always that easy to find a job. To become a senior developer … well, you need a job.
I have tried to describe some of the things you can do as a student that will help you be different from others, and thus, land a job easier.
1. Social tech activities while studying
Try to visit as many social activities as you can (without affecting your study plan). Tech people tend to be less social so this is a chance to differentiate. Watch out for events in Facebook, Twitter and other social networks or in local news. Information, references and contacts that you will get there can be very precious.
Taking part in these activities will help you practice you communication and social skills and they an important factor in your career development.
2. Average grade
“In real life, nobody cares about you average grade”. This is bad advice I got during my studies. What is even worse, I still hear it during the time I spend giving lectures.
When a company wants to hire students to do an internship, the Human Resources department of the company will receive many resumes that are very similar to each other. What happens in this case is the problem with “average grade.” If the company has planned to hire five interns, but they receive 100 resumes, they will call for an interview at most 20 of them. If 10 were selected based on activities and experience outside of study material, the rest will be chosen based on their highest average grade. Not because this is always the best way or that we know for sure that it will bring the most talented people, but because it is something that differentiates between very similar resumes.
A high average grade does not guarantee you a job position or success in that matter but it is a characteristic that can be measured and compared.
Work as hard as you can to get higher grades during your studies.
3. Internship in a company
Having an internship experience is the easiest alongside being the best way to differentiate from others. Also, it is the best way to advance in your professional career. In some cases you can also get paid to do an internship. I advise you to start your internship as soon as you finish the second year of your study program. Usually the third year is filled with more professional courses so this internship time will help you understand which courses to elect and where to concentrate your efforts.
It is very common to have two to three internships during your study period. Try to understand, as soon as possible, what makes you feel good during your internship period. If during this period, you don’t have the urge to wake up early and run to work, stop your internship. Change the company, manager or even your field of work.
Try to find a person from whom you can learn as much as you can. There will be a lot of smart people in the company that you are doing internship but some of them will not be willing to share knowledge with you or anybody. Stay away from them until you become their boss. Then you will need them.
4. Mathematics
Can you become a good developer without being good in math? Yes of course. I know a lot of great developer that don’t even have a tech degree and math is not their best skill.
Still, as a student, math will help you tremendously in understanding programming better. This is particularly pertinent when it comes to doing problem analysis, error handling, and finding new and simpler solutions. During programming, you will have to deal with concrete mathematical problems like:
- Game development: trigonometry, liner algebra (matrices, vectors etc.)
- Image and sound processing: Fourier series and transformations, graph theory, hash tables.
- Cryptography: Theory of prime numbers
Math is an important part of professional programming just as running is important for football players or weight lifting is for basketball players. Do not forget that programming is a skill on its own. A good mathematician will not always be a great programmer.
5. Personal Projects
Work on as many personal projects as you can. These can be your personal ideas of a product or just a reproduction of an existing project with an add-on or a twist. This will not only teach you programming, but also business analysis. Try to understand (a) what the client wants to do, and (b) what are his/her requests. Was there a way to make this easier or better?
Keep your personal projects well organized, save them in a cloud and try to complete them. Most of the personal projects that students present to me while interviewing are not completed. A well organized and completed project, besides helping you practice, will show the company that you are an organized and persistent person.
In GitHub you can find many repositories with projects (open source) that can be used to analyze and practice. Some of them can be clones of popular games like:
- Flappy bird — https://github.com/sivvig/ZombieBird/commits/master
- Bejeweld — https://github.com/saltares/freegemas-gdx
- Mario — https://github.com/arjanfrans/mario-game
6. GitHub and Stack Overflow account
As a software developer, GitHub account is your new resume. With companies using Git more and more as a version control system, this will also earn you more points.
Put your school and personal projects on GitHub and be careful to put effort on
- Commits
- Comments on commits
- Branching
- Code Versioning
A good read about modeling in Git can be found here.
Open a Stack Overflow account and try to be active with questions and answers. It shows interest and commitmesant. Stack is not just for “Copy-Pasting” code.
7. Be careful with “extravagant” job titles
There is a lot of confusion when it comes to Job Titles in software development industry. Titles like Intermediate and Senior have a lot to do with time spent working so being a student will usually be seen as unprofessional if you “declare” yourself as senior developer in a previous part time job. Also, different companies have a different way of expressing these titles for developers. (for example in US, many companies prefer Software Engineer I, II and III)
If you are not sure about this, just put Developer as you job position and try to explain what you actually did in the previous job because that is what’s important.
8. Do not stop reading books (Novels)
Books will help you in enhancing your creativity which is important in your job as a developer. They will also help you ease your mind a bit from the code while also developing “out of the box” thinking. Some simple examples:
- “Neuromancer” — William Gibson
- “The Circle” — Dave Eggers
- “Hackers” — Steven Levy or even something commercial like
- “Digital Fortress” — Dan Brown
9. Programming language to start your career
Learn to program because the Programming Language itself you can learn in a month. If I need to give an answer, start with JavaScript or Python.
Personally I think you should concentrate on what you want to do or create before your start learning or practicing a specific language.
If statistics if what you want, here are some links to help:
Last but not least
Don’t expect from the employees to blindly believe that you are a hard worker or that you can become great developer in the future. This is not something measurable if there is nothing to rely on. Everyone can learn and the will to become a developer does not give you the edge over someone else. Just the will on itself is not good enough in the market right now.
I have used the points stated above to do selection of students for doing internships within LinkPlus and we have a 100% success rate of employment till now. It is true that other factors (full-time working hours during internship, on-job training, a specified person working full time only with interns and the presence of senior developers in the office) have had a great impact in this success, but the selection of interns based on analyzing data was the most important factor.
