My First Professional Portfolio

I have just built my first professional portfolio. After this learning experience, I feel strongly that I am still not in the good shape of being a decent computer science professional.

The reason I had that feeling comes from the fact that I have almost literally nothing to say about my expertise when it comes down to a serious level. Although I have been an ICS student for almost four years, I barely had done something that is profound and significant enough that I would like to put down on my portfolio to show to the other people. I had written several C/C++ and Java applications, but those are merely for the course assignments and they hold no important value in terms of demonstrating my computer skills.

The only completed project that I finally put on the portfolio is the MyISERN project that I had been working for the last semester. However, even with such a project that I almost spent the whole semester on, I still feel like it is not good enough as a showcase product. There are still many things can be improved, or have done better. The other project that I put on is the Informative Workspace that I will be working on for this whole semester, and hopefully by the end of this semester it can become a project that I am proud to show to the other people.

Besides the projects, actual work experience that is related to the computer science field is another thing that I found myself missing. I had worked for a while before, but my jobs were totally unrelated to my field. I strongly felt the severe lacking of practical experience as well as the skills and knowledge towards my major.

However, things are not as bad as I mentioned after all. After doing my portfolio, I realized many of my weakness in terms of professional skills and knowledge, and I am more motivated to develop these weaknesses into strength in the future. I believe this is a good thing that I learned from building my first professional portfolio.