When you're in school, it can be hard to gather the information you need to stand out and get the job you want out of college. This guide is aimed at giving you helpful tips to venturing out into the real world after classes end. The sooner you get started on these things, the more impressive your history will be to potential employers.
The most simplistic of options are free and listed below. There's a a slightly more advanced option here that would be to buy a domain name, build a site/portfolio, and get email setup on a custom domain.
- Join BuffaloDevs (Obligatory plug)
- Post a message here with a way to contact you
- Create a LinkedIn profile
- https://www.linkedin.com/
- Follow their setup guide and remember that it should resemble content on a resume (more on that later as well)
- Create a GitHub account
- https://github.com/
- Keep this semi-professional, actual picture of yourself short and sweet description
- Extra Credit: setup a GitHub Pages repo for your username following this guide
If you followed "Establish an online presence", you have a lot of good content in LinkedIn and your GitHub profile. Note that there are options to generate a resume from your LinkedIn profile, but use them with caution. If you have Microsoft Word, there are many templates to follow and for free alternatives you can use Google Docs
Once you have a basic resume together, join the #help channel in the BuffaloDevs workspace in Slack and ask for some feedback. It's always good to have one set of eyes on the document, but better to have more.
This is a virtually required step now that not all schools will inform you of how important they are. Lucky for you, we have some local companies that offer internships. In the #jobs channel of te BuffaloDevs workspace in Slack you can find more or ask about current offerings. Additionally, the local Girl Develop It chapter message board has a newsletter that shows job and internship information.