Career

These activities polish your career skills from different angles, and they all draw on the same raw material: the work you’re already doing on your project.

With AI-assisted screening on the employer side and AI-assisted applications on yours, treat a polished resume as the minimum rather than what sets you apart. Lead with demonstrable shipped work: a live project, a public repository with real users or real reviews, a portfolio that shows what you built and the decisions behind it. Your capstone is that kind of evidence, so several activities below make it visible. Keep practicing live coding without AI assistance too, because many technical interviews still test it.

These activities also build the record you draw on when you write about your own growth at the end of a long project.

“Opportunities don’t happen, you create them.” (Chris Grosser)

Resume Building

Get your resume to the state where the capstone entry does real work for you, and practice the peer review exchange with a teammate. Two to three hours, plus a peer round.

Write or update the resume, leading with projects and internships rather than coursework.
Cover the sections a technical resume carries: name and contact information, education, technical skills, projects, work experience, and leadership or service, plus honors and awards if you have them.
Aim it at one kind of role: software engineering, data, security, machine learning, or whichever you’re applying for. Which projects and which skills a reviewer wants to see differ by role.
Make the capstone entry concrete: your contributions, quantified where the numbers are real, with a link to the repository or landing page. Leave out work you only intend to do.
Have three peers review it, then revise.
Keep all three versions: the original, the feedback, and the revision.

Comparing before and after teaches you which feedback actually moves the needle, and the set is strong retrospective material.

Optionally, run this a second time with an AI agent and set the two outputs side by side, noting where they differ, because the comparison shows what the tool changed; either version can be the one you keep.

A good output is the original resume, the peer feedback, and the revised version, kept together.

Portfolio Development

Effort: Half day

Build the page you send someone instead of explaining yourself in a paragraph. Half a day to build, then short updates as work lands.

Show working software, not a list of technologies. A portfolio that demonstrates what runs and explains the decisions behind it is worth more than a skills matrix.
Include the capstone: link the repository, the running product, and your team’s public landing page.
Write the decisions, not just the features: what problem each project solved and why you approached it that way.
Have three peers review it, then revise.

A good output is a live portfolio link plus the peer feedback you acted on.

Public Code Repository

Effort: Half day

Get one repository to the standard where someone who didn’t build it can run it and a reviewer can read it. Half a day.

Pick a repository you own and are willing to make public.
Make the README accurate: what it does, how to run it, what doesn’t work yet.
Verify the setup instructions from a clean clone, on a different machine if you can.
Have two peers review it, then revise the code and the README on what they found.

A good output is the repository link plus the peer feedback you acted on.

Mock Interviews

Find out whether your account of your own work actually lands on someone who wasn’t there. About an hour each, two of them.

Arrange two mock interviews, with peers, the career center, or an alum.
Walk through one thing you built on the capstone, end to end, as you would for a hiring manager.
Ask your interviewer the hard question: what did they still not understand when you finished?
Write up strengths and the two things you’d change next time.

A good output is a written summary of both interviews naming what you’d change.

Personal Branding

Write up one real problem you solved, publicly, so there’s something with your name on it that isn’t a resume. Two to three hours for the post.

Pick a problem from your capstone that took you real effort to solve.
Write the post: what broke, what you tried, what worked, what you’d do differently.
Publish it somewhere durable and share it once.
Set goals for your presence over the short, medium, and long term, so this is a start rather than a one-off.

A good output is a published post about a real problem you solved, plus your written goals and the links.

Practice LeetCode

Keep the live-coding muscle warm. About an hour per problem, at least three.

Solve at least three problems on a platform such as LeetCode.
Do them without AI assistance, because live coding interviews typically don’t allow it.
Note what you had to look up, which is the actual signal about what to study next.

A good output is your list of problems solved plus a brief reflection on the concepts you learned or re-learned.

LinkedIn Optimization

Get your profile to say something specific about what you’ve built. About an hour, plus a peer round.

Update the profile, with the capstone as a real entry rather than a course listing.
Have three peers review it, then revise.

A good output is your updated profile link plus a short note on what you changed and why.

Write a Cover Letter

Write one letter that could only have been written by you, for one job. Ninety minutes, plus a peer round.

Find a real job or internship you’d actually apply for.
Write the letter, naming specifics about the company and about your own shipped work. Specifics make it credible to a reader who may assume a generic letter is AI-generated.
Have two peers review it, then revise.

A good output is the job description, the peer feedback, and the final letter kept together, which makes a reusable template.

Attend a Guest Speaker Event

Hear how careers actually went, rather than how they look in retrospect on a profile. Two events plus a write-up.

Attend two guest speaker events, at school, at work, or at a meetup.
Ask a question at each one, since that’s what attending gives you that reading doesn’t.
Write a reflection on the speakers’ career paths, what they said, and how it relates to your own plans.

A good output is your reflection, including the questions you asked and the answers you got.

Attend Job Fairs or Industry Networking Events

Meet employers in a setting where the conversation isn’t an application. Two events.

Attend at least two events.
Talk to people about what they build, not about openings, because that’s the conversation people remember. The 20-minute networking meeting cheat sheet is the structure to run.
Follow up within a week with anyone worth staying in touch with.

A good output is a summary per event, with date, contacts made, companies of interest, and your planned follow-ups.

Join a Professional Association

Get access to a professional community that outlasts the course. Membership plus two events.

Join an association such as the ACM.
Attend at least two of its events.

A good output is your membership confirmation plus a summary of the events and the networking opportunities available.

Complete an Online Certification Course

Effort: Multi-day

Close a specific gap between what your project needs and what you currently know. Effort varies widely by course, from a weekend to several weeks.

Pick a course that serves your project or your target role, such as a cloud platform certification.
Complete it and keep the certificate.

A good output is the certification plus a summary of the new skills and how they apply to your career plans.

Participate in a Hackathon

Effort: Multi-day

Build something end to end under a hard deadline, which is a different skill from building something well over several months. A weekend.

Join a hackathon or codefest, such as BeaverHacks.
Ship something that runs, however small.
Note what you cut to get there, which is the transferable part.

A good output is a summary of the project with screenshots, the challenges you hit, and what you learned.

Job Shadowing

Find out what the job is actually like on an ordinary day. One day, plus a few weeks of lead time to arrange it.

Find a professional in your target role willing to host you. Start early; this is the activity that needs the most notice.
Spend a day observing, and ask what the boring parts are.

A good output is a reflection on what surprised you about the day-to-day work and how it changes your career goals.

Read Wait But Why on Picking a Career

Effort: 1 h

Get a framework for career decisions rather than a list of options. About an hour to read; it’s a long post.

Read How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You), which covers understanding your own values, exploring paths, and making long-term choices that fit them.
Write a reflection on how the framework changes your own planning.

A good output is your written reflection, applied to your actual situation rather than in general.

Read a Recruiting Advice Blog Post

Learn how hiring works from people who have watched it from both sides. Thirty minutes to read, plus a reflection.

Pick one and read it:
Write a reflection on what it changes about your application plan.

Several of these describe the same move from different angles: do a piece of real work for the employer before they ask, which your capstone project makes easy to try.

A good output is your written reflection naming one thing you’ll do differently.