Student projects: do they influence employment prospects? [closed]

Question

I am a BSc student who is going to start the last year of my degree and I am wondering how relevant my final year project choice is going to be when looking for a job next year - and how it will affect what jobs will be open/closed to me when searching for my first programming/developer job.

I presently have a couple of options for my final year project/ dissertation:

• Robotics/pattern recognition: one of my second year professors does research in Robotics/visual pattern recognition and has invited me to work with him during my final year project. It would be in Python as it has good APIs/libraries in this field.

• A document repository system: with a database and some networked elements (client/server), probably using apache jackrabbit and java on the server and C#/WPF/.Net stack to develop the client. C# because bezier curves in WPF is a snap and I have a particular type of GUI in mind for the client component. This is my own idea/project.

The first one sounds the most fun and in all likelihood will be the one time that I am involved in real research (I am 35 and have a family). The second one sounds closer to what real-world development is. My past work experience did not involve programming, or IT.

Answer 1

As someone who hires regularly (and our last two hires had just graduated), I'll say this: If it's a group project, it doesn't help because it's too hard to figure out who did what. If it's a singleton project and you can answer deep questions about it, it's certainly a plus.

In fact, anything that shows initiative is a plus -- school projects, side projects, even extra-curricular stuff that has nothing to do with programming.