Stop Creating Library (or XYZ) Management Applications for Your Resume — Instead, Do This!

Most engineering students are still creating Library/Student or some random XYZ management applications while studying computer science, simply for the sake of putting them on their resumes. I agree that these can be your learning projects, but they should definitely not be the ones you put on your resume! In this blog, I’m going to share my mindset towards picking projects.

When a company is hiring an engineer, they are looking for an engineer and not just someone who can code. It’s important to understand the difference between an engineer and a coder. A coder is someone who can code a well-defined problem and its solution, while an engineer is someone who understands and identifies the problem and brings optimal solutions to the table. Your coding skills are of no use if you are not able to provide an optimal solution, and you cannot provide a solution if you don’t understand the business domain. The ability to solve LeetCode problems is very different from solving real-life problems.

So what should be the focus while picking projects as a student? It’s actually very simple: start observing problems around you. Some tips are:

1. Look for repetitive tasks you are doing and see how you can automate them. For example, writing boilerplate code!
2. Look for problems that are preventing you from being productive, for example, spending too much time organizing your files manually.
3. Look for problems that can help save money, for example, developing a budgeting app that tracks your expenses and suggests cost-cutting measures.
4. Look for problems that are preventing you from being consistent, for example, not being able to lose body weight.
5. Look for problems that are not solved yet, for example, unemployment.

And many more…

Don’t approach projects as a way of demonstrating coding skills, but use the time to build solutions for genuine problems. The solution might not be thousands of lines of code, but the impact it will carry will demonstrate your ability to solve problems quickly and in a frugal way! Such projects will set you apart from the crowd. Just put yourself in the shoes of companies. If 10 resumes come to you, and 9 have generic projects while 1 has a project that solves a genuine problem and has real users with feedback on platforms like Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store, which candidate would you interview? Also, some of these projects might turn into million or billion dollar startup ideas! That’s how Facebook started!

If you have more observations to share for project ideas, feel free to comment down below.