The main qualities that employers are looking for in the Projects section of your resume are: passion, experience, and skill.

PassionYour projects should be related to areas that matter a lot to you (sustainability or education, for example) so that you can talk about them passionately during interviews.

ExperienceYour projects should show a high level of programming and should (if possible) involve industry-focused concepts like APIs, Cloud Services, and LLMs. Those broad ideas might seem out of your league as a college student, but are definitely within reach. By no means will your personal project reach the level of complexity that your employer’s technology does, but that isn’t the point. Rather, you’re just trying to convey that you have experience with software and that you’ve spent some of your free time learning about it.

SkillYour projects should be well-polished and functional. If you move onto the later stages of the interview process with a company, expect them to look at your project code to check your work. Any visual components that you build should be well-designed and aesthetically-pleasing. Your code should work as promised. If an employer explores your project and figures out that it doesn’t work, they’ll have lots of questions for you.