After the final presentation it is time for the HYF core team to decide who is graduated and who is not. The whole goal of HYF is to get you a junior developer internship and give you the tools to get through it, so to be graduated means that we are sure you are ready to do that.
There are four categories the class can be divided up into:
- Graduated without general assessment
- Needs to do a soft skills assessment
- Needs to do a tech skills assessment
- Needs to do a general assessment (soft skills + tech skills)
For some students, the previous results in the curriculum as well as their performance in the project has shown that they are ready for an internship and so, they will graduate without any need of the general assessment.
For others, the feedback from mentors or from their interviews with adyen/the HYF team mean that more work is needed before graduation. This means that there will be a soft skills assessment section in your general assessment interview. Have a look at the Graduation interview preparation repo again to prepare for this. You will be applying for the position that is mentioned there!
If your previous technical interviews did not go very well, or you struggled with the code base during the project you will be asked to do another tech skills assessment during you general assessment interview.
Remember that whatever path we suggest you follow is because we want to help you forward in your career. If you are in doubt on why we choose a specific path for you from the list above, feel free to discuss it with us.
If you do not pass the general assessment it is not the end of the world! The curriculum is hard and sometimes it just takes a little longer. For anyone that does not pass we will set up a tailored plan to work on the parts that you need to improve. The plan really depends on you and what we think you need to improve, but here are some examples as reference:
Example 1: Build 1 or 2 technical assignments from real companies in a defined period of time. Example 2: Conduct some interviews with HYF mentors to get a second opinion on how we can help you improve your interviewing skills. Example 3: Redo the graduation project with another class.
If you keep putting in the work, we will continue to support you even after the final project!
If you pass, definitely feel free to take a week off. Those were quite the 7 months and you deserve it!
After that it is important to keep programming though. By then you will hopefully already be in the interview process, but if for some reason there is a scarceness of opportunities, or you are waiting on responses, keep building something and improving your CV!
If you have an app in mind that you've always wanted to build then this is your chance! If you do not, then choose a technology that you have heard of and build something simple in it to try it out. Developers do this all the time, usually with a chat or todo app as those are the simplest apps to build.
Some suggestions of technologies (but go for anything that catches your eye):
- Nextjs - build a small app using nextjs (https://nextjs.org/) which is a react framework!
- Angular or Vue.js - widen your frontend knowledge by building an app in an alternative to react
- GraphQL - we teach REST API's but graphql is an alternative and definitely gaining popularity, have a look at Apollo and use that
Keep the technical assignment repo in mind with all these projects though! Potential recruiters will be looking at them and making them look good is important!