A longer term approach would be press coverage. If you’ve got press coverage, that’s immediate legitimacy and prestige points there. You’re getting recognized, and BIU students want to be a part of that recognition.

[for the most part] Career fairs are for IBM and Microsoft. Startups recruit at hackathons.

Few schools (even big schools) will turn down companies willing to offer internships to undergraduates and that increases visibility considerably. Offer to give talks at student ACM events or similar. Offer to give tours of your business and what you do. If you have qualified staff, offer to have them teach elective and/or adjunct courses.

1) The best way to determine if a graduate wants a job is to look at the internships and summer jobs they held during their coursework. This is pretty basic: if you want a job in what you’re studying, you get a job in that field while you’re studying. It gives you valuable real world experience (hopefully) and an opportunity to determine if you actually love the job or not. It’s also the most widely available discriminator, and sometimes the only available discriminator (unfortunately). As such, it should be the first thing on your list.

2) Some of the discriminators he suggested aren’t necessarily always reliable. It depends heavily on the situation and the university. I was required to do an individual project to graduate, and all of my “interesting” electives were just the least terrible choices of those foisted upon me. You need to have a good background on what the school mandates before making assumptions along those lines. I suppose it’s fine to discriminate along those lines if you know what the school does, but you certainly cannot generalize.

2) While individual projects and independent study certainly say a lot about a person’s motivation, I have to question the educational value of such activities when performed alone. They’ll get more value out of other activities, like an internship or another class, then they will out of the independent study.

I should clarify: I don’t think independent projects are stupid. I think there’s tremendous value in them, and that all students should do them as part of their regular coursework[1]. Doing them as coursework means you take away all of the problems with true independent study: the student has an advisor to keep them on course and help them when they are stuck, they have a defined set of products to produce by the end of the course (e.g., a paper, a presentation, working code), and the whole process more closely mimics how things work in the real world. It has all of the upsides with fewer downsides.

But given the choice between “do an independent project all on your own” and “get an internship”, I’d advise students to do latter every time. They’ll gain more value, suffer a lot less, and gain the benefit of having someone to point out their mistakes. They are still learning, after all.

4) Expectations on student performance need to be appropriately tempered. My individual project? It was a failure because the scope was too large. Our group project? A partial failure, due to an unfortunate accident involving a solar panel falling on my board (turns out circuits don’t work very well when they’re cleaved in two). Failure from students shouldn’t surprise anyone, which is important to remember. In fact, it’s another thing you should expect to see. I only bring this point up because the author said an individual project doesn’t need to be, “totally unique, or profitable, or complete” but he didn’t say “It’s perfectly OK to fail”. It’s something that, in my opinion, needs to be made more explicit in the expectations industry has of students.

[1] Their coursework should ideally include a group project of similar complexity too.

Learning new languages actually involves another aspect as well. Obviously, not all languages are the same. Learning a functional language if you’re used to object-oriented programming can open up doors to entire new ways of thinking, which is important as a programmer. You need to be able to identify the best tool for the job.