Hey everyone — I’m a final-year student, and I’ve been wondering this a lot lately. We always hear that “you need a good project to land a job”, but most students I know either copy from GitHub, get stuck, or just… give up. We’re doing a small open survey to understand this from both sides — students and educators. If you’ve ever: Built or struggled with a final-year project
Helped someone else do it (educator/mentor)
Wanted to sell or learn from real-world projects
We’d love to hear your honest experience. 🙏 It’s just 2–3 mins, totally anonymous. 📄 Survey Link – for students & educators
We’ll be using the insights to create open resources and maybe a system that actually helps. Thanks in advance if you participate — or drop a comment about your experience.
It’s been a while since I was a student. When I was in university, I actually had one project that was then used in a real world context for at least a few years - by university students.
But most of my colleagues never did anything like that. Here are a few reasons why (and also why I didn’t do more):
- Lack of experience
Making an actual useful real-life application is hard. You quickly get into things like security, device-model-specific bugs, support for users using the thing wrong, because you have no idea to do proper UX and so on.
Moving from making toy prototypes to real programs is not simple at all.
- Lack of mentoring
University teaches you stuff, but only the very broad-strokes basics. When you get your first real job you are usually in a team with some more senior people and they can help you move the university basics into a real-world context.
- Lack of funding
Most people can’t afford putting hundreds or thousands of hours of work into a project without anyone paying the bills.
- Lack of time
Most people have to finance stuff like rent themselves. They are already balancing university, work and life. There’s not a ton of time left for a third thing.
- Not a lack of ideas
Every programmer I know has more ideas than they will ever finish in their entire life. And every programmer has a bunch of MBA people who tell them every time they meet about their amazing app idea (“You know, an app where you can buy things, but you buy by swiping right! It’s going to be the next Amazon! If you implement it, you can have 10% of the profits!”).
If anything, having too many ideas leads to switching your side projects once your last side project becomes too annoying.
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Students generally don’t have real-world problems that need solving. I think pretending they do makes a lot of assumptions about their life, hobbies, free time…
It’s much much much more important to have a co-op program. Everything practical I learned in university was through my co-op work terms.
I am responsible for hiring some devs right now, and there’s been a wide spectrum of competence from people who have “real projects”. Especially with how prevalent AI is, people can literally just talk to an AI agent and get some kind of app/website spun up with 0 skill and effort. What I am always looking for is people who can work on a team in an existing codebase.
For one: your university might own anything you create while using their resources and facilities.
Tbh University just wants our success to promote their uni. that’s why I prefer external projects rather than uni projects.
It’s the real world part.
I have written a SMTP-Server in C and some crud services in java, but everything ran on localhost.
If I wanted to expose them on the web I would have to ensure the code is actually secure, ensure compliance with data protection regulations, moderate user generated content, get ssl certificates, a domain and server hosting.
Half those steps are one minor mistake away from a large bill.Yeah, it’s easy to underestimate how big of a leap it is from a toy application to real-world usability. Not just in terms of security, but also:
- useful error messages
- logging / monitoring
- configuration
- building a distribution
- deploying in a reproducible way
- documentation
- integration with existing infrastructure
- data migration strategies
- etc.
This adds a lot of complexity, so you’ll need to learn additional complexity to be able to deal with it at all:
- modularization
- version control systems
- software specifications (via unit/integration tests)
- team communication
- helper tooling, like package managers, linters etc.
Learning about all this stuff takes years, especially if no one in your surroundings has much experience with any of it either. Professors don’t have the time to gain or retain this experience, since they already have a different full-time job.
My advice would be to get students to do internships or to take a job as a working student in a company/organization. Sometimes, these can be shitty for the students, but they can often provide significantly more real-world context than college ever could.
time
it takes quite a big bunch of time to craft anything even remotely useful - the golden era of extreme java programming has long passed
Idk which market you are in. In mine no one cares about your project. Most of companies don’t do innovation. Most of real life projects I saw just moves data around. When I interview people all I care about is knowledge of tech stack and what I call “analytical thinking”.
Money and time.
Tons of people build cool projects during their time in university, but the vast vast majority of people don’t because they are eating beans and rice and ramen and pizza and studying, not spending 500€-1000€ on iterative prototyping and the equipment to test everything.
Rather than writing something from scratch it would make more sense to maintain an existing application stewarded by the university. There are some universities that work this way but even then they don’t have enough projects for everyone to work on
I have bills and student loans to pay. I didn’t get a job in my field right out of college so I’ve been stuck bouncing around min wage to make ends meet. Have very little time to do any projects.
It’s a Google Docs link…
More like… Google Dox! Ha, ha… That was really bad, but I couldn’t help myself. I’m sorry :3
