“Walk me through your capstone project.” You’ve been waiting for this one, and the answer pours out. Here’s how it often sounds from a new graduate:
“So it’s a campus events app. You can sign up, browse events, filter by category, and save events to a list. There’s also an admin page where society leaders can add events. It’s built with FastAPI and React.”
That’s all true, and the candidate clearly built something real. But what has the interviewer learned about them as an engineer? They know what the app does. They have no idea how the candidate thinks.
The Interview Is for the Why
When an interviewer asks you to walk them through a project, they want to see how you think about your own work. What problem did it solve? Which decisions did you make, and why? What went wrong, and what would you change?
A feature tour answers none of that. Your README can list the screens and features. The interview is where you talk about the decisions behind them.
You’ve already done much of the groundwork. Your project write-up from Write Up a Project in Two Layers has a thirty-second version and a ten-minute version. The shorter version becomes your opener, and the longer one, with its decisions and trade-offs, provides the detail you offer when asked. Keep the write-up open while you practice. Anything in it that you can’t explain out loud is a warning sign.
