Advice for students
And how they can stand out in this job market.
Are you a computer science or related student struggling for internships and jobs right now? Keeping on reading to have an edge in your job search.
As we all can feel, the job market in tech is pretty bad now. With all the industry layoffs and hiring freezes by most companies including big tech, there’s more supply of people than demand for jobs. This especially hurts students trying to find full-time jobs or even internships since they are competing with experienced folks.
How do you get an edge over others in your job search?
First of all, you have to accept that it is a hard market to land your first job. One of the hardest parts of your job search is how to stand out and get your resume/profile noticed. A lot of students have very similar profiles as they have similar courses and have done similar course projects. As a recruiter or someone reviewing your resume, they need to see something unique as they all want the best of the best. Sure you have to brush up on your data structure and algorithms skills and do a lot of Leetcode to clear interviews but in this market getting an interview is quite hard.
But there is one thing you can really do to stand out is to - build. Even though big tech is not hiring that much, there are some mid-size or smaller companies that are hiring and they look for people who are building stuff outside their coursework. If you can show that you have built something you probably have a big edge.
So what is something you can do to quickly build something to show on your profile and also in the process learn something? Here are some steps you can take to do it
Have a Github profile where you can show off your projects. It’s really a great testament that you like building and coding.
Check out Github Explore. You might find something which really sticks out to you and you might be able to contribute.
There is this really cool Github feature where you can search for good-first-issue or help-wanted issues. Generally, these issues are designed for minor problems but they are a great way to start contributing. You can also filter by language if you are familiar with specific languages and are more comfortable coding there.
What if you don’t find something that’s interesting to you and wants to build something of your own? With the tools that we have in software development today, it’s quite easy to build and deploy something. People really like stuff that’s deployed. It shows you can ship and that’s what a lot of companies are looking for.
If you are very comfortable with a language and want to use that, definitely use that if that makes your build and ship faster. But if you don’t have a choice, below is some advice that can get you started very quickly.
Use Nextjs for building your application. It supports both JavaScript and TypeScript which are easy to learn. It has a frontend in React and a pretty good API framework for the backend. You might ask how and where you can deploy your application quickly. There’s this pretty cool application called Vercel which is paired up nicely with Nextjs so that you just need to link your Github profile with Vercel and when you push your code, it just auto-deploys your code and hosts it behind a URL. It’s that simple. Even if you have a very basic idea, just build it and ship it. Now you might ask, what if you have a backend with a database, I would suggest you use MongoDB and use their Atlas product where you can host your database online and directly connect from your application.
One amazing thing about this stack is, all of it has a FREE tier which is more than enough for a basic application. You won’t have to spend any money to get multiple applications set up.
Last but not the least, do mention everything you build in your resume. It could help you stand out and a by-product of this is you would learn new things. I hope this article is useful to get you started and give you an edge in this job market. Good luck and keep building!
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