M1 Portfolio Requirements

Purpose

• Acknowledging Progress: portfolios give students the opportunity to understand their own progress in pursuit of their career as a software developer.
• Practicing Narrative: portfolio presentation pushes students to articulate their narrative of their technical and professional journey.
• Direct Feedback: portfolio feedback allows students to receive a summative perspective of their performance, including threads of successes and areas of growth.

Structure

• Student-directed presentation (5-7 minutes)
• Instructor feedback (3-5 minutes)

Requirements

Each student will deliver a 5 minute slide presentation in front of your instructor(s). Students might find it helpful to review their Interview Prep - Project Log to prepare for the following prompts.

• All students will respond to the following prompts:
  • What is your response to “Tell me about yourself”?
  • How has feedback impacted your development in this module and helped prepare you for your job/career?
  • Which project produced the most growth in you? Technically or Personally. Why?
  • What is something you’ve learned about yourself in receiving project feedback?
• In addition to the above, a student who will repeat the current module uses their presentation time to explore why they struggled, discuss the lessons learned, and lay out a plan for what will be different next time.

The presentation should not be a series of slides that directly answers each of these questions with bullet points, but instead should:

• Follow a narrative format – this is an opportunity to fine tune your story and how you speak about your work. Slides should flow naturally from one to the next.
• Include images and graphics to illustrate the concepts you plan to discuss. These may include screenshots/animated gifs of an application you created, snippets of code from your projects, diagrams of interesting concepts/structures that you used in your project(s).

Submittal

• Students are not required to submit any documents but instead should be prepared to give their presentation to their instructors and engage in a follow up conversation. Please practice and ensure your presentation is no more than 5-7 minutes long.

Potential Outcomes

• If everything goes to plan: good luck in next mod!
• If a student fails to present a portfolio (due to illness, etc): they will need to present it in Week 1 of the next inning
• If a student delivers an exceptionally poor portfolio: we’ll determine next steps, possible PIP, etc