I recently graduated with a BS degree in Physics and I am looking for a job in the tech industry. A common question I get is talking about recent projects, so in general, what kind of assignments in academia counts as useful projects in industry? I've had the pleasure of going to a private institution with one of best science programs in the country, I managed to get coursework and research work in Physics, E.E, Economics, Computer Science, and Computational Biology.
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You will likely get better answers at Workplace.SE than here, unless you are very specifically looking for a research job in industry (if you are, please edit your question to include this). Consider clicking on the "flag" link underneath your question to attract moderator attention, then request that your question be migrated to Workplace. (Please don't simply cross-post.)– Stephan KolassaCommented Jul 1, 2015 at 10:39
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Speaking as somebody on the other side of that table, what industry is generally looking for is evidence that you can actually put the knowledge that you've acquired to use. The sorts of skills that industry are looking for include the abilities to:
- prioritize in order to achieve a larger goal, rather than getting bogged down in subproblems along the way.
- work well with others as part of a team
- follow through a complex piece of work to completion, rather than giving up after the "interesting bits" are complete
- understand how your work fits into a larger whole and goals beyond "I was told this was what we were supposed to do"
- synthesize together multiple different types of skills
- estimate task difficulty, set a schedule, and manage unexpected problems as they arise
- ability to understand the needs of the people who will put your work to use (sometimes jargonized as "customer focus")
- determine when you need new knowledge or skills and take appropriate self-motivated steps to acquire these
All of these things are important ingredients in somebody who will be a good contributor to a larger organization, especially an R&D organization where you can't afford to be micromanaging a bunch of poor performers. Somebody who is strong in these abilities but lacks particular technical skills is often much preferable to somebody who has the technical skills but lacks the bigger picture "meta-skills." That's because technical skills are a rapidly moving target, and a motivated self-starter can generally acquire new technical skills much more easily than a technically skilled person can become a motivated self-starter.
Research projects are often good places to find this, as are large personal hobby projects. If you don't have any of these, class projects are a reasonable fall-back, though they will often be viewed with more skepticism, since they tend to be small in scope, have no "customers," and are often somewhat "spoon-fed."
