Personal Portfolio

Overview

Your personal portfolio is a place to highlight your work and skills. It can be used during your job hunt - you can send out links to your profile, and Turing staff may share your profile to employers who come to us asking for candidates.

Setup and Submission

You can either use this provided template or create your own portfolio from scratch. You should include all content listed below regardless of which route you choose.

When you are finished, submit the URL to your portfolio using this submission form.

This is due by EOD Friday of week 4. You are welcome and encouraged to submit earlier for feedback.

Required Content

  1. Title (ex: Software Developer)
  2. Professional-looking photo
    • This should be a photo of just you (no kids or animals, sorry!)
    • Use the same photo as your LinkedIn and GitHub profiles if possible
  3. About Me Description
    • Tell your professional story
    • Consider how this is consistent with your LinkedIn and overall brand
    • See below for more details on this section
    • Make sure to have someone else review this section for clarity, spelling, and grammar
  4. Email address
  5. GitHub profile link
  6. LinkedIn profile link
  7. Polished copy of resume
  8. Preferred Locations
  9. Previous Industries
    • Limit to 5 previous industries. If you are concerned about this, please reach out to your Career Specialists.
  10. Skills
  11. At least 2 projects
    • Show variety: paired, team, individual
    • Include screenshots for any project with a frontend
    • Tools Used
    • Code repository link and Deployed link if available
    • See below for more details on project descriptions

About Me

What do you want your profile to say about you? Write out a rough draft of your professional story considering using this framework:

  • What is your career story about your past, present, and future that you want to share with employers?
  • What prior experiences are relevant and transferable to the tech industry?
  • What impact you want to have in software development?
  • What kind of company and culture are you passionate about adding value for?

In this section, make sure to answer the following questions:

  • Who am I?
  • Why am I in this field?
  • What’s next for me?

Show readers who you are by telling a story of your journey into tech. Share enough for them to want to hear and learn more!

Your Portfolio About Me section, LinkedIn summary, and resume summary (if you chose to use one) should all be slightly different.

  • You want the reader to learn something new with each profile
  • Each summary has a different purpose; think about the audience
  • Resume summaries should tell why you are the best candidate for the role relevant to the job description.
  • LinkedIn summaries allows you to add a personal touch in addition to relevant skills and experiences that will attract recruiters and hiring managers.
  • The Portfolio is similiar to the LinkedIn audience; employers want to know your backstory, your value proposition and what’s next for you as a developer.

Projects

The main recommendation here is to remember that you are speaking to potential employers, not investors. These project descriptions should briefly describe the project, and then quickly pivot to describing your primary contributions and the things you learned. This is an advertisement for you, not the project.

Be consistent in your project descriptions. Too often students use different formats and headings for each of their project descriptions. It can help your audience of potential employers to quickly digest this information if the order in which you provide information is consistent across projects.

A good format to follow is:

  • First sentence: name of project, number of collaborators, primary technologies used, what it does.
  • Second sentence: main learning goals of the project & the things you were doing for the first time in this project (if you don’t know, ask your instructors).
  • Third sentence: any stretch goals you were able to achieve.
  • Fourth sentence: anything you specifically focused on in the project.

Examples:

  • Terminal Crawler provides users a CLI that scrapes Turing’s Terminal site to check alumni profiles for broken project links. This is the first project that I’ve tackled outside of the Turing curriculum, which has given me an opportunity to explore topics not covered in class. At this point I’ve created a simple CLI that scrapes the Terminal site and successfully identifies broken links. I’m currently planning on adding the option to send email notifications from this plain old Ruby project to users who have broken links in their profiles, and potentially implementing background workers to give users the ability to get back to work rather than waiting for those emails to send.
  • My Name is Dad is an app that randomly generates dad jokes to new dads in training that I created with a team of two other developers. During this 10 day stretch project we prioritized self-teaching and implementing the state management library, Redux, for a small scale app. My primary responsibilities on this project included managing all CSS styling and animations, directing the team with decision making, and monitoring quality control. I also helped my team members test our project using Cypress and use Redux to update and manage the state of our application.

Nice to Haves

Nice to have but not required:

  • Pronouns
  • Skills you are currently learning
  • Twitter/X profile
  • Project collaborators
  • Deployed Project links

Evaluation Details

Your portfolio is due by EOD Friday of week 4 via the submission form above. A passing portfolio will include all 11 of the required pieces of information listed above. If any are missing or incomplete, the project will not be considered passing until those sections are completed.

Completion of your portfolio is a graduation requirement.

Lesson Search Results

Showing top 10 results