What was that one project that got you the job?

It wasn’t one single project, it was several over the span of years.

Employers don’t care as much about an attention grabbing outlier, it’s much more valuable to see a consistent string of high quality diverse projects

Well, I worked for a public university as a student and got essentially unlimited time on the school’s supercomputer doing a really cool NASA funded climate science project. So there were a lot of applicable skills that stood out. The only reason I got that position was because the school I went to was brimming with opportunities for undergrads, which demonstrates that the school you go to does in fact matter for a lot of things. It altered the trajectory of my entire life.

For me, it was working on one of the engineering design teams at my school, something like formula SAE.

It was something that was brought up in my interviews and I was able to talk about how I developed the ability to work with teammates, including non software devs.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cub4n.abvcalculator

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Havent really touched it since I started doing software professionally. Feels bad since I'm pretty sure its gonna get taken down soon cause it doesnt meet compliance for the latest OS's but I dont even know where the key is for that project anymore. Feels bad but it was a simple tool I made to help me with my brewing hobby at the time.

Simple retrieval of data using public APIs.

I think it was the sockets/networking project in a networks class. Had to work with one other person, source control and choose two languages. We started with C, found it too difficult so settled on Python but partner didn’t know it and had to teach them. Caught them up to speed, and managed to hit every deadline despite being set back by language change and teaching my partner.

My masters project got me my first job. It was an ML model for predicting regions of DNA that affect heart genes. The interviewer liked how I criticized my model and talked about its weaknesses.

Many, many years ago I designed and built an ultrasonic phased array 'RADAR' in my last college year.

I received around 5 job offers from RADAR and defence firms without interview because of that.

Looking back, I can see why.

My ramp-up time as a totally inexperienced new entrant at a RADAR firm would be shortened because I would already know the basic concepts, jargon etc .. and I would have already shown interest in the field.

That said, I'm not sure how in 2024 you could get an equivalent project through the current ATS and structured interview systems to be seen by a possibly interested hiring manager.