Portfolios

1. The purpose of a portfolio is to demonstrate your engineering experience to employers/graduate school admissions committees.
2. The Northwestern MSR program requires that you maintain a public portfolio in order to graduate.
   • The MSR program website links to all student and alumni portfolios.
   • We periodically feature exeptional portfolios
     • Many portfolios are exceptional, but due to space limitations not all of these can be featured.
3. At minimum, your portfolio must contain at least 3 projects:
   • Fall Quarter Group Project
   • Individual Winter Project
   • Individual Final Project
4. Most (if not all) successful MSR students greatly exceed these requirements.

1. The front page of your portfolio should immediately make your projects visible and accessible.
   • Each project should have a compelling picture or animation, descriptive text, and link to a page with further details.
   • Each project page should have its own separate url so that specific projects can easily be shared with others.
   • Avoid making readers take an action (such as moving the mouse or clicking) to see your projects and the high-level description.
2. Other items appropriate for a portfolio include:
   • About Me
   • Contact (including LinkedIn profile)
   • Resume
   • Other Interests

1. Each project should contain, at a minimum:
   • An edited video showing your project working.
   • A brief description of the project.
   • One or more graphics (such as a block diagram) outlining the general technical structure of the project.
   • A brief discussion of the main technical points, in a hierarchical format:
     • Rather than a large block of text, break up the project into meaningful section headers and sub-headers
     • A reader should be able to get an overview of your project by reading the overall titles and get more details the lower-down the hierarchy they go.
   • A conclusion or discussion of the results.

2.If a project was done in a group then you must:

• Make clear that the project was a group project and acknowledge your group members by name. (Failing to do so is a violation of the Honor Code).
• Emphasize and discuss your role.

1. Although a portfolio is rather informal, avoid:
   • A "play-by-play" of your path to reach the final goal: you may have worked hard on debugging something but (with a few exceptions) that is not relevant to the portfolio.
   • First-person narrative text about what you worked on in the project (versus information about the project itself).
   • Over-description of technical details (leave for git repository and auxiliary documentation).
   • Putting anything on your portfolio that you do not want an employer to see.
2. Each portfolio post should link to a git repository with the source code/design files and detailed technical documentation.
   • Likewise the README.md in the git repository should link to your portfolio.
3. The amount of content should be proportional to the effort, time, and importance of each project:
   • While a winter project may be fully described by a single block diagram, for example, your final project will likely require more description and a breakdown of various subsystems.
   • The first page or so of your portfolio should stand on its own to provide a complete picture of what you did:
     • Additional content that fills in some details can come afterwards, divided up with good section titles

1. Undergraduate, MSR hackathon, and independent projects great to have on your portfolio.
2. Each post should lead with the main purpose and a result summary, within a few seconds of seeing a project, the reader should understand what it is.
3. Imagine that you are reading 50 people's portfolio and you have given yourself 1/2 hour to do it.
   • Reading is a bad term here: skimming is better.
   • You need to catch the attention of the reader quickly.
4. How do you catch the reader's attention?
   • Have several posts so the portfolio does not look like an afterthought. The first impression of your page is ideally "Wow, this person has done a lot of projects".
   • Good Graphics: Let the main project page convey the gist of each project by providing a meaningful picture. It makes sense to spend some time creating good graphics because these stand out and are usually the first part of a portfolio that a reader sees. Having poor graphics may cause somebody to stop looking at your portfolio before reaching your content.
   • Minimal Effort: Scrolling down to see your projects is not minimal effort, nor is needing to move your mouse over an image to see a description.
5. How do you retain viewers?
   • Be concise.
   • Be grammatically correct.
   • Be easy to read.
   • Short paragraphs/sentences.
   • Hierarchical.
   • Graphics and videos.
6. Your portfolio also needs to serve more in-depth readers:
   • Maybe a project you did is aligned with the reader's needs.
   • In this case, a reader may take a deeper look at a specific post. Your post needs to stand up to this scrutiny by having substantive content.
   • A hierarchical presentation format, coupled with being able to have even more in-depth information in git helps convert cursory readers into in-depth readers.
   • You are unlikely to get an in-depth view if you don't first catch the eye of someone taking a cursory look.
7. Do you have a flair for design?
   • Let it shine! But keep the website practical.
   • If web design is not interesting to you don't worry: simple clear content is effective too.
8. Putting effort into items that show more effort like Custom URLs, Custom HTML, and unique design can leave a good impression:
   • Only if you do it well and put in the extra time.
9. The more pre-canned and generic your portfolio looks, the more the burden is on your projects and videos:
10. Even a Wix portfolio can work:
    • But, be careful because it can also imply a level of carelessness (especially when compared to your peers).
    • Employers will know that you put less effort in to your portfolio than others.
11. Look at past MSR student portfolios for inspiration.
12. Look at your portfolio on different web browsers and on different devices, including a tablet or phone.

• Jekyll is the static site generator used by github pages and our recommended method for creating a portfolio.
  • A static website is a website that directly serves webpages to clients without the server dynamically changing the content of those pages
• You need not use Jekyll to use Github Pages, you can host any statically generated website with github pages
  • You could use another generator like Hyde, Hugo or even write your own HTML/CSS from scratch
• You need not use github pages to host your portfolio, although it is a convenient option.
• Some past students have used their own domain with github pages for their portfolio or used alternative hosting services.
• Navigate to Student Template to get started on creating a template portfolio
  • This is just a sample portfolio.
    • You should feel free to modify it liberally.
    • Putting effort into your portfolio design makes you stand out from the crowd.
    • There are many themes available, for example at https://jekyllrb.com/docs/themes/

• Student Template (As deployed on github pages)
• Github Markdown Guide
• Github Jekyll Guide
• Official Jekyll Documentation