A Fun Way To Build Your Resume
Let me preface this by explaining how the Online Capstone Project works (if you aren’t enrolled in the class). We are mostly focused on working on our specific projects. In my case that is the Malware Analysis project. However, we still have posted reading on a weekly basis. These serve as short introductions to useful material for students preparing to finish their academics and move into the professional world in the realm of software engineering. This week, one of the “Explorations” was titled “Programming Projects” [1]. In short, this class article described how building hobby projects is a good way to build out your resume, especially if you are light on work experience in your chosen field.
Let’s first consider the benefit of working on your own personal project. Well there is the obvious benefit, it shows a direct example and proof of your skills to employers. However, it also shows motivation and the ability to bring a project from start to completion [1]. Beyond just resume building, it can also be a great way to build up new skills and gain experience in new technologies.
Sounds great right? Well if you are anything like me, often the hardest part of this process is deciding on a project and getting started. There are unlimited possibilities when it comes to designing your own personal project. What do you do if you cant decide?
ChatGPT to the Rescue
Honestly, this Exploration got me thinking…..and thinking. Lately, even before this article, I had been wanting to start a personal project, especially as my time in this program wanes. I like to feel like I am always learning. However, I am often quite indecisive. I research and come up with ideas, and often get so bogged down in the decisions I don’t even end up starting anything.
I am sure you have heard of ChatGPT. It has been everywhere in the news lately. It is an AI chatbot that operates in a conversational manner [2]. You can ask it any question and have an actual conversation with it. It remembers previous questions and statements so that you can refer back to things said earlier in the conversation. It’s very cool.
Well, I thought, maybe Chat GPT can help me decide on an idea for a personal project? My idea was that I would tell it a bit about what skills I had and what I wanted to work on. I even thought that I could tell it my timeframe for completing a project and have it give me options based on that as well.
Prompts
Instead of just telling you about the results I received, I thought I would build out this blog post to include prompt suggestions if you want to use ChatGPT for similar reasons. I find that I get the most out of ChatGPT when I am as specific as possible. Therefore we have two options here. We can either tell it exactly what we want: a general topic, a technology and a timeframe. Or, we could set up ChatGPT in a manner that lets us perform the same process for multiple project ideas.
In preparation for this article, I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with prompts and found the following to be the most successful.
We ask Chat GPT to generate a project idea for us based on a general topic, technology and a timeframe. We also ask it to breakdown the project based on learning outcomes, skill prerequisites and how to get started. Lets see what ChatGPT gives us in response.
Wow! ChatGPT gave us exactly what we asked for. Now we have a decent outline for this sample project. It even gave us a week by week task breakdown. What if we want an alternative project? Lets ask ChatGPT!
Another great idea! We get another detailed project outline, with enough information to get us started.
What if we have questions for ChatGPT about the prerequisites? We will tell ChatGPT that we are not confident in our machine learning concepts. Lets have it give us a recommendation for how to proceed.
ChatGPT has given us an outline for how to develop our machine learning fundamentals before we tackle the project. It even recommended online courses and books to read.
Conclusions
Well I think that it is clear that this is a great way to generate project ideas in a fun and interactive manner. I have shown enough to get you started, but you can really take this as far as you would like. You can ask ChatGPT to flesh out the outline more. You can ask it to give you additional resources for learning skills. The possibilities are endless. Just make sure to keep in mind that ChatGPT doesn’t always return up to date or correct information. It was trained on information that ended in 2021. So take everything with a grain of salt.
References
- https://canvas.oregonstate.edu/courses/1901255/pages/exploration-programming-projects?module_item_id=22693141
- https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/
