Sean Tibor: Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 126 if my math is right. And today we're going to be talking about projects and portfolios for young coders. My name is Sean Tibor. I'm a coder who teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And my name is Kelly Schuster Perez. And I'm a teacher who codes and plays with a dog while recording. Sean Tibor: Yeah, like as if you need more distractions. Right? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: No one watches this. We can edit that out of the podcast, right? Sean Tibor: It'll be fine. Now I have to leave it in. So how are you doing this week, Kelly? It's been a little bit since we caught up. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. I am two days back from holiday. It's been along to new classes, new start, new 6th graders. I love third quarter. It's like my best quarter of the year. The kids are ready to go. The eigth graders are still okay. And yeah, it's good fun. Sean Tibor: Third quarter is the best quarter. It's absolutely the best time to be teaching. It's before the summer break is looming. It's after the kids have gotten all of the jitters out, started to show some maturity, if that's even possible. Right? No, but who am I to judge? I'm not mature. But that third quarter, there is something magical about it. I feel like that's the one where you go the farthest and the highest and everything just works the best. Everything clicks. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It does. And I think it has to do with that. Taking that break in the middle of the school year. Some people don't like it, but it's such an opportunity to recharge. I've saw a lot of people recharging over the break. I did a lot of sleeping, so probably the most sleep I've had in the past ten years. Sean Tibor: Wow. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I know. It was a lot. That's a whole nother episode. Eating cheese, seeing Vermont and sleeping. Sean Tibor: We have our first comment from a friend of ours. Anne Hemian has written into the chat. We might have to reply back separately. I'm not going to show that on the live feed, but. Hi, Anne, nice to hear from you. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, great stories. She's chiming in because she has taken this step. She is attending my classes with the 6th graders. Sean Tibor: Wow. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And she's really nervous and I told her she's going to be awesome. And she downloaded the moo editor on her first day and she's hopefully doing her homework and coming prepared for class tomorrow. We're really excited. She's a humanities teacher and we love having humanities people taking python, so we're excited. Sean Tibor: I love this I'm actually really sad that I'm not there for that. I wish her the best of luck and I hope that it's a fun and rewarding journey. It's been a pleasure for me to learn how to code, and I love the humanities also, so hopefully she can come at it from the other direction and get a little bit more out of it for herself. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. Excited about that. Sean Tibor: All right, so let's talk about young coders and portfolios, because everyone's thoughts turn towards internships and college admissions. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You know what's funny? I've had a couple of 10th and 11th graders come up to me because they're not in Python and they are starting to talk about what they can do in order to beef up their resumes and get into college. And what do I think about a lot of things? My first thoughts always go back to what you said to me when we first started coding. Get a project, get something. Have something to show what's going to make you stand out. I know a couple of colleges like to have portfolios of work, and so we started having conversations and I know you have experience with interns, so I thought, what a great episode. Sean Tibor: I love this. In a world where everyone consumes, making things is what makes you stand out 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's why I said, if you're not creating, you're consuming and you're wasting my time, go away. Sean Tibor: Exactly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Who needs to watch Fortnite when you can play it? Sean Tibor: Exactly. Or build on it, or find a way to make money from it, or be an entrepreneur or whatever. I love this idea. This is especially relevant because I have, over the last couple of years, been working on college interns as a program within my current employer. I really enjoy doing it, and it's something that keeps me connected to the things that I love the most about teaching, because it's a way of helping guide younger people through the process of becoming that professional person that they want to be, whatever that looks like for them. The process and the journey that people take from college to the professional world is not an immediate flipping of a switch. There's a process that you have to go through, and one of the things that I'm always looking for when I'm reviewing resumes or when I'm talking with people is tell me about the things that you've created, the things that you've built, the lessons that you've learned along the way. If you reflect on what was good about that process or that project that you worked on, or what things were really hard and challenging. What did you learn from it? And the students that can articulate that in a really clear and compelling way about what was this thing that I built and why did it matter to me? They stand out. They absolutely show up better than the students who say, I did this project for a class and it was just an assignment. Everyone else did the exact same project. Even someone who says, I took this and I went with it, and I did this, and I added this, and I went above and beyond and I did these other things. That stands out way more than just classwork and test scores and grades and GPA and everything. I want to hear about what people have actually made. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, 100%. When I was doing the data science, we put all these projects in our GitHub, and it's a little bit embarrassing because we had to put it in GitHub in order to share it with our professors. But it was all these projects that someone else had already did or everyone was doing so you could go and search and everybody on GitHub who's taken this course, it was in there, but it was our capstones and our group projects where we actually got to explore and do stuff with our passion. And those are the projects that I feel like should stay on the GitHub or you should expand upon, and those are the ones that you liked. It was a thing that you wanted. Mine was on beer and wine. So what else? All the breweries around the world. Come on. That was a great project. Sean Tibor: It's a huge industry. I mean, I think it's totally legitimate. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I would definitely share that once I fine tune it some more, but, yeah, projects. Sean Tibor: Yeah. And so let's talk about what makes a good portfolio or what makes a portfolio in general, right. It's a way to showcase your work and what you can do. Right. Whether it's your creativity or your discipline or your coding standards, whatever it is, it's a way of demonstrating that. And for Anne that's listening on the call, I'd liken it to writing samples. It's showing people your voice as a coder. It's a way for people to see the way that you think, the way that you structure things. How much of this is copy and pasted from stack overflow versus original code that you wrote? What libraries do you use? It's a window into you as a coder, and it's invaluable. It tells us so much more about the person than a GPA does or even a class schedule or a list of skills. So that portfolio should be a collection of the work that you have actually done, whether it's your own work individually or work as part of a group, assuming that you have permission to share that it needs to be public. It should be something that everyone can see. It should be curated. It should have information about. Here is this project, here's what it does, here's why I made it, here's what I wanted it to do, and here's how it works. So some basic description about it. You don't just hang a painting in a museum without any information. You have to say who made it and what the medium was, and even a little description of what the inspiration of the artist was. Provide that context for each project so that myself, as the viewer of this, can see it and go, okay, I have the setting in which to now understand how this works 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And I think if you're at the high school level and you're starting to curate this, even in eigth grade, I tell the eigth graders, just make something. This is not something you're going to show to your college, probably most likely unless you continue to work on it. But it's a good practice. And you're going to start building up your digital footprint of your projects. Maybe your silly project or your graph that you made about how many push ups an 8th grader can do. Maybe that's not something eventually that you'll show MIT or Carnegie or anything, but it'll be a starting point. And then you can start to build on how you're going to curate your projects in the end and then maybe showing a growth. This is where I started. I started my journey in 8th grade and this is how bad my code was then, but this is how much I progressed. Showing that timeline or having the ability to show that timeline is going to be something that's going to be interesting for colleges, then a good practice for your internships and your future careers. Sean Tibor: Yeah. I want to also say that some of the things that I've seen that have worked really well, of course I've seen a hub repository or here's a link to my GitHub account and you can see all my activity. But I've also seen students put together a static website. Here's GitHub pages, where I created a website that showcases the work that I did and it draws attention to the work that I'm most proud of or the ones that I really want people to see. And when you use that model or use that approach, you can treat GitHub like the storage closet with all of your stuff in it and the website that you share with everyone as the window into your work and direct them to the things that you, Kelly, want them to see as the best examples of the work that you've created. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. And I was reading up in a couple of, I don't know if you've heard about this, the maker portfolios from MIT started, I guess, in 2013. I started researching about it because I was wondering what colleges actually accept portfolios, because, say, our kids are in a private school, and a lot of our kids take a lot of AP classes and they have great gpas and they're fantastic students, but how do they stand out from the one person sitting next to them and what are they going to do? And so I started looking into a couple of colleges, and I was seeing Tufts and Washington University, MIT, and they started a program called Maker Portfolios. And it used to be something that they would do for the artist, and an art student would have to put in their portfolio and submit it with the reflections. And that's how they got into an art school. But MIT started accepting it for engineering students, maker students, which would be code. They did art still. And then I forget there was a fourth one, but it was a neat setup. And some students, they showed a couple of examples. Some students had a web page, like a full webpage where they wrote reflections. They did the progression almost like a journal that you would do for the TSA, the technology Student association, where they go to those competitions, and they have to show the progression of their development. It's kind of interesting to see, and it makes me wonder how many other schools will be doing this, because I can't imagine it takes a long time. But now with the onset of Chat GPT, how are they going to know if the college essay is legit? So they're going to want to have something that's more personal and not 100% sure of what colleges are. But that's my prediction, is that they're going to want to see who you are, where you are online, and not just what you can produce in an essay. Sean Tibor: Yeah. A huge prevalence of universities are now looking up students online, doing basically online background checks to see what their social media presence looks like, what their search presence looks like. So by creating the portfolio, you have the ability to make it so that when your name is searched, the information that shows up is stuff that you control. Right. These are things that you've created. So I love this idea because for a lot of reasons, even if the schools that you're most interested in don't accept portfolios like this maker portfolio project. The act of creating the portfolio establishes this information online that is uniquely yours. This is the project that I've created. These are the collection of projects in the portfolio. When you're writing your college essay, you can talk about an experience that you had or something that you learned or something that was challenging. You can reference that project in your essay with the link and say, I did this. And when I was working on this project, I ran into these challenges and you can see the final output here. So once you make it public, once you make it published, where anyone can access it, it becomes something that you can then incorporate into the other aspects of your application. When I'm looking at student resumes, many of them will have links to the actual project code or the project website that they published from their project in their resume. Here's a project that I worked on, here's the description of it, and here's the link where you can go see it yourself. And I will, nine times out of ten, click on those links to be able to see what kind of project they created and how it works. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, that's very cool. What about. For me, it's LinkedIn. I'm all about LinkedIn. And having taught in London and Lima, I'm starting to see. I'm that old. I'm starting to see a lot of my kids going through my former students going through colleges, and they've started their LinkedIn accounts in their end of the year high school, and it has grown through college. And these are like fabulous portfolios of information showing their work. I have one student who interned with Google. She's interned with another place in Canada, and she's just got a list of everything, all nice and neat on her LinkedIn, and former supervisors of the intern who have given her reviews, and she's posted in things that she built or she worked on in that company. And that's another form of a portfolio that's going to be beneficial for future computer science students. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it acts like an enhanced resume, right? So I've always thought of your profile page on LinkedIn as being like a supercharged version of a resume because you can add more content to there than you can usually fit on a piece of paper. It's well organized. You can search through it, you can look at it, but you can include things like certifications that you've achieved, recommendations from other people. But this is also a place where you can showcase your work. I've seen a lot of students put links to their projects that they've worked on with other students on LinkedIn as a work experience that they have had, especially if it's something that's long running. Like, we created a website that does this and we've been working on it for the last year and a half to build it out and make it better, become an entrepreneurial sort of thing. More so than just a project. It's legitimate to be able to put something like that as a website that you've created or a business that you've started, even if it hasn't generated a dollar in revenue. Because as long as you're treating it as though it is work and a side hustle or a side project that you are working on, that could make money eventually. It can go on there and it can be something that employers can see, coworkers can see other people as they're searching for. You can see to get an example of the type of work that you've done, even if you don't have other experience. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, what about, and this is maybe thinking in job applications, but as a coder, you develop a lot of skills. Do you see with your interns how they highlight the soft skills or the nontechnical skills in their portfolios or in their resumes, talking about time management and teamwork, how do you see that with your interns? Sean Tibor: As a yes and right, so, yes. And the thing with projects, and this is the really tough thing about that transition from higher education to the workforce, is that for the most part, and there are exceptions to this, but for the most part, universities do not teach the full set of skills that a software engineer will need in the workforce. They can't. It's not possible. And it's not necessarily what they're aligned to do or incentivized to do. Their job is to produce graduates that are hireable. They're not necessarily incentivized to produce graduates that will be fully fledged engineers right away. I don't think this is unique to software engineering or development or coding. It's the same thing with being other types of engineers as well. You need on the job experience, you need certifications. There's continuous learning and development that happens after university. What the projects and the portfolios do is they require an integration of skills to happen that universities don't always teach. Sometimes you see this in project classes or group classes. If you have a practicum project that students have to complete, usually in their last year or two of university, they will have to integrate a bunch of skills together in order to make that work. And of course, that includes the collaborative skills, the team leadership, the technical leadership, the research, the learning, the understanding. But it also includes a lot of hard technical skills, like how do you share code between five different people? Maybe that's GitHub, maybe that's something else. How do you collaborate technically? How do you perform testing? How do you ensure that it's right? What are all the processes that you go through in this project? And so you see not just those soft skills, I also call them the harder skills. For a lot of software engineers. They're harder, but honestly, they're the skills that you don't necessarily get when you're just doing an assignment for class. I'm completing this problem set, or I'm working on a really well defined project that's canned and it's just me and a partner working on it. If you have a team of five people, you're likely including all of those interpersonal skills, organizational skills, time management, project management, plus technical management, managing software development lifecycles, managing technical requirements, setting up infrastructure to host your code, all of those things that you wouldn't necessarily have to do or aren't requirements in an assignment, but become absolutely critical and a great place to practice that integration of skills when you're working on a project in a way that could and should be shared in a portfolio later on, all these things. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And that requires that reflection that we do a lot, because I'm not sure the kids think about it right away. Oh, yeah, I did do a lot of work that wasn't just coding, and it does show a lot about who I am as a person and how I work with teams. So it's a lot of things going on than just the code. Sean Tibor: Yeah. Honestly, you will be asked about these things in interviews, whether it's a college admissions interview or it's an employment interview. You're going to be asked about not just the technical requirements or the technical aspects of the things that you've done and achieved, but you're going to be asked, what was hard about that? How did you find it working in the team? Talk to me about an example where you were the leader of a group and you had to resolve an issue between team members. We're all interested in how people tackle the problems, not just what they did or what the technical aspects of it were. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's very interesting. I wanted to give a shout out to Michael Kennedy's last podcast, where he had Sydney Runkel on the show. It was a great podcast. It's called the Young Coders blueprint. To success. And Sydney talks about her journey as a. I think she's a junior in college and how she's got in and did some interning. She's been coding in high school. She talks about the steps that she's done, and I think it's worth a listen if you're really interested and you're in college and you want a little bit more of what she's done to get in. I want to ask you about this. It's the idea of contributing to GitHub. I know you've said this to me a lot, and it still feels very nerve wracking getting into someone else's code. And even if it's just changing documentation or doing a pull request, I know you have strong opinions and you've been telling me, just do it. So go ahead if you want to do your two cent on that. Sean Tibor: There are things about this. There are aspects of the portfolio, aspects of contributing that are scary. We should acknowledge and accept that they are scary. These are things that are outside of our comfort zone. They make us uncomfortable. To publish our work for the world to see contributing to a project. What if they don't like it? We have all these fears, like, what if they reject my pull request? Okay. What if I publish my code and employers hate it? Maybe it's a sign that you can work on it more, or that you can do more with it. Or maybe it's a sign that maybe that employer doesn't really value what you're doing anyways. They can't see your growth and they can't see your potential. Is that someone you want to work for anyways? The scary part of this is taking that step to put yourself in an uncomfortable position and make no doubt about it. Publishing your portfolio, publishing your code, just like publishing your writing or publishing your art, is a brave and risky thing to do. It makes you vulnerable. You will feel uncomfortable by doing this, but it will also give you opportunities and open doors that you never thought were possible. Over the years, I've had the opportunity to work on a lot of different projects and talk about a lot of different things. It all connects together. That's over the course of now, 20 plus years of working in education and technology and marketing. I've got a lot of different experiences that I can draw upon and speak on in an interview or on my resume as I'm going through that employment process. When you're early on in your career, whether that's in high school or in college, you aren't going to have as many of those experiences, and you're naturally going to feel like those experiences don't count because they're not big meaty professional experiences where you change the world. Put it out there anyways. Put yourself out there. Take the risk, make the pull request, go take that step. Because the old saying nothing ventured, nothing gained is absolutely true. Here. You have to put in the work. You can't just put out stuff that's just garbage. You can't write Chat GPT prompts and take that and turn it into here's my project. You have to actually put in the work and make something that is yours. You own it. You did it. It wasn't just Chat GPT. Thanks for the help. But it's something that you made and when someone asks you about it, you own it. You can talk through it and say, here's what I did. This part I totally copied off of stack overflow because I just needed to get it to work and I don't really understand how it does, but it's something I want to come back to later. That's great. That's authentic, it's genuine, and it gives people an example. Again, coming back to that early thing that I said gives people a window into who you are and how you think and what you have to offer to the world. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's good advice. And I say start early because then at least you just show that was my 6th grade code. That was my 8th grade code and I put it out there and I practiced. Sean Tibor: As you make better code, you start to push it down. It's a queuing system. The first things in are the first ones out, right? So when you make good stuff and it's better than the last stuff you wrote, guess what? You update that on your website portfolio and you say, this is now the new hot thing for you to check out. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Unless it's a podcast and they keep listening to our first episode. Sean Tibor: No, that episode will live forever. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This has been fun, and this is a Wednesday bite. Do you have anything else to say? Sean Tibor: No, I've said enough. But if you're one of those people that's sitting there hesitant or worried about what people are going to think, put yourself out there. Take the risk, be brave, be bold. See what happens. And the worst thing that could happen is someone says, this sucks. Okay, you can handle that. If you're sitting there worried about that, you can handle someone saying this sucks to your code and say, okay, thanks for the feedback and just keep trying. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Sounds good. Love it. Sean Tibor: All right, I think that'll do it for our Wednesday bite. So, for teaching Python, this is Sean. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And this is Kelly signing off channel.