M4 Portfolio Requirements
M4 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 minutes)
- Instructor feedback (5 minutes)
Requirements
Each student will deliver a 5 minute slide presentation in front of your instructors.
- 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.
- A student who is repeating unsuccessfully and will leave the program is excused from the presentation and can use the entire portfolio time for feedback and discussion.
- A student who passes the module will present the following:
- What is one thing you learned in Mod 4 that you will take with you into the job?
- Weaving it all together, how will you be successful in the workplace?
- What makes you particularly stand out as a candidate?
- What will make a company and role the perfect fit for you?
- How will you share your learning from Gear Up with your future company?
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.
Potential Outcomes
- If everything goes to plan: good luck in next mod!
- If a student fails to present a portfolio (due to illness, etc): 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