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Posted by Timothy Gardini
Timothy Gardini
Courses Plus Student 2,622 Points

Interns. What would you expect them to know for front end dev?

Here is my situation,

I have an interview in a few days for a web dev internship. I am currently studying CS at a state university.

The university doesn't offer classes in web dev. Most the courses are CS theory based with some programming sprinkled in. I know the question will arise during the interview, "What courses have you taken in front-end web dev?". How should I answer this question?

And also, I want to make sure that I'm not trying to jump to far into Web Dev before I'm ready. I have a good background in HTML, CSS, JS. I'm mainly on this site to augment my learning at university. The internship is for ASP.NET Dev, which I have a decent understanding of, and I have a strong background in OOP and C#.

What would you expect an intern to know who is looking for a future in Web Dev?

Thanks for any guidance!

2 Answers

Kevin Lozandier
Kevin Lozandier
Courses Plus Student 53,747 Points

Most Universities, in America at least, don't have much modern front-end and backend web development and web design courses; many that do are usually have outdated material, so it's not necessarily an odd predicament (In fact, I was in the same position until a few weeks ago).

For what it's worth, countless of successful people in the industry didn't even go to college.

That said, I would be honest that the state university you currently attend didn't have much to offer as far as modern web development and web design classes , confiding how you've learned web design and web development up to that point.

That includes what conferences you've attended, what Github projects you've helped improve in any way. and etc.

Disclosing your learning progress on learning platforms such as Treehouse wouldn't hurt, as well as projects you've done if that's applicable for you.

I know firsthand it can be hard as a University student to have traditional projects under your belt, if you don't have your own ideas: After all, most of the people you're around on an everyday basis are unlikely to have the budget you'd want for your services, they aren't too keen on signing contracts for your services, and so on towards working on things for them on respectable terms that work for you and them.

That's why I highly recommend, if you do have any ideas you're personally passionate about, build minimum viable product builds (otherwise known as MVPs) to share them on Github, CodePen, JSBin/JSFiddle, SassMeister, & other platforms to publicly share code.

Also check out http://www.studentguidewebdesign.com/ by Janna Hagan throughout the rest of your college career.

I hope that helps!

Timothy Gardini
PLUS
Timothy Gardini
Courses Plus Student 2,622 Points
Timothy Gardini
Timothy Gardini
Courses Plus Student 2,622 Points

Thanks Keven for your input,

I do have a lot of ideas, maybe i'll start posting to Github. The MVPs seem like a great way to get started. I have a bad habit of trying to do way too much on my projects before anything else is done. Usually this is because I'm not a "great" designer, and consider myself more of a developer.

Thanks again.