How Do I Stand Out?

Grow your Portfolio. Nurture your Network.

My visit to Virginia Tech last April included many conversations with students. And, surprising to absolutely no one, the #1 question that students asked me was, "When trying to get a job, how do I stand out?" Each time I was asked, I answered as best I could in the time that I had with that student. But I found myself wishing I already had my substack in place, because this was definitely one of my "No Repeats" situations.

If I reflect on my passion for writing stuff down and leaving a paper trail¹, the root motivation for this drive is efficiency. Efficiency, to me, is a combination of the "work yourself out of a job" and the "don't do the same task twice" mindsets. Combining those two, you can see that my desire to write stuff down is all about me trying to pass on what I've learned in a scalable way, where I'm not repeating myself.

My point isn't that people are predictable and I know all the questions they're going to ask, as well as have all the answers. My main motivation behind capturing as much as possible in written form is to maximize efficiency, to increase the rate of our collective evolution.

In a mentoring relationship, the quicker that the mentor and mentee can "cut to the chase" of the specific situation to discuss, the better. I'm not mentoring the world, I'm mentoring one individual. So I want to spend as much time as possible talking about that individual's unique lived experience. To that end, I don't want to waste time regurgitating general philosophy. So I'll give a tease and drop a link for one of my posts. And then we'll move on.

My "No Repeats" rule is: anytime I answer the same question three times, it's time for me to write it down. So here is my full response to the Computer Science student who asks, "How do I stand out?" Probably 80% of this applies to any student asking this question, but there is 20% that is very CS-specific.