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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] 1 points 2 days ago

It's been a while since I was a student. When I was in university, I actually had one project that was then used in a real world context for at least a few years - by university students.

But most of my colleagues never did anything like that. Here are a few reasons why (and also why I didn't do more):

Lack of experience

Making an actual useful real-life application is hard. You quickly get into things like security, device-model-specific bugs, support for users using the thing wrong, because you have no idea to do proper UX and so on.

Moving from making toy prototypes to real programs is not simple at all.

Lack of mentoring

University teaches you stuff, but only the very broad-strokes basics. When you get your first real job you are usually in a team with some more senior people and they can help you move the university basics into a real-world context.

Lack of funding

Most people can't afford putting hundreds or thousands of hours of work into a project without anyone paying the bills.

Lack of time

Most people have to finance stuff like rent themselves. They are already balancing university, work and life. There's not a ton of time left for a third thing.

Not a lack of ideas

Every programmer I know has more ideas than they will ever finish in their entire life. And every programmer has a bunch of MBA people who tell them every time they meet about their amazing app idea ("You know, an app where you can buy things, but you buy by swiping right! It's going to be the next Amazon! If you implement it, you can have 10% of the profits!").

If anything, having too many ideas leads to switching your side projects once your last side project becomes too annoying.