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What’s blocking students from building real-world projects in college? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey everyone — I'm a final-year student, and I’ve been wondering this a lot lately. We always hear that “you need a good project to land a job”, but most students I know either copy from GitHub, get stuck, or just... give up. We’re doing a small open survey to understand this from both sides — students and educators. If you've ever: Built or struggled with a final-year project

Helped someone else do it (educator/mentor)

Wanted to sell or learn from real-world projects

We’d love to hear your honest experience. 🙏 It’s just 2–3 mins, totally anonymous. 📄 Survey Link – for students & educators

We’ll be using the insights to create open resources and maybe a system that actually helps. Thanks in advance if you participate — or drop a comment about your experience.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Yeah, it's easy to underestimate how big of a leap it is from a toy application to real-world usability. Not just in terms of security, but also:

useful error messages
logging / monitoring
configuration
building a distribution
deploying in a reproducible way
documentation
integration with existing infrastructure
data migration strategies
etc.

This adds a lot of complexity, so you'll need to learn additional complexity to be able to deal with it at all:

modularization
version control systems
software specifications (via unit/integration tests)
team communication
helper tooling, like package managers, linters etc.

Learning about all this stuff takes years, especially if no one in your surroundings has much experience with any of it either. Professors don't have the time to gain or retain this experience, since they already have a different full-time job.

My advice would be to get students to do internships or to take a job as a working student in a company/organization. Sometimes, these can be shitty for the students, but they can often provide significantly more real-world context than college ever could.