PROJECT IDEA!

[jimmah4013]

Hi guys,

I am an undergrad still and was wondering if you guys had any ideas about projects i can take on and show to companies as part of my resume. is there anything out there like a programmer myself that would blow the company people away taht i would like to intern for? i mean, anything would be great. i just need a stepping stone to guide me in the right direction. any ideas would be great.

thanks!

[Darkmaster]

student assistant job as programmer in one of the institutes.
that counts as working experience.
maybe you also get some interesting projects you can work on and not just unit tests :D

[jimmah4013]

what kind of projects do you recommend?

[Jayhawker07]

I don't know what would impress a company per say, but to show you are a well rounded programmer in c++ here is an idea. Make a game (how fun it is is irrelevant) that uses a class based engine, and use polymorphism/virtual functions and higher level concepts for classes. Then, if you could make it 3d, but if you don't have a solid OpenGL foundation just stick with 2d graphics. You could also make it multiplayer and have it utilize UDP ports to allow multiple players.

Idk if this is the right approach, but it would certainly show that you can effectively produce a working product with many different aspects.

[vince1027]

In my company, we don't look at projects based on how closely related they are to our products. What's most important is that the applicant showing his/her portfolio can explain the ins/outs of the work done. By ins/outs, I mean the rationale for the design, understanding of concepts used, etc.

For example, if we have two applicants, one wrote a full-blown physics simulator that really works but cannot provide good rationale for the bad design (or lack of it) and another one who wrote a very simple XML parser that is not fully optimized but applied object oriented concepts and design patterns he/she learned, the applicant who presented the XML parser will be preferred over the other.