A classic catch-22: You need experience to get a job... but you don't have a job. What do you put on your resume?

I've seen this question a lot lately given the intern & ft hiring slump. New grads are having an extraordinarily difficult time to stand out and get jobs.

So what do you do? Create your own experiences. It demonstrates competence *and* shows passion.

How? Build something. And if you can't, write about something.

For Software and other roles where there's low barriers to entry, building something is easy. If you're interested in photography you could build a site that lets you do some basic editing. If you're into data, you can find a public data set, analyze it and publish your findings. If you're into gaming, you can build a game.

Just build _something_. You'll automatically be ahead of 99% of people that haven't built anything from scratch on their own.

For careers that have high barriers of entry (ex. biologist, chemists, etc.), write about something. As an example, the science world has been excited recently about a new superconductor discovery (LK-99). You could start a Twitter (X?) account documenting people's replication attempts and summarizing it for the masses. Or write a blog summarizing the research around it.

In all cases, doing *something*, doing *anything*, is better than having nothing on your resume. Class projects don't count. I've seen way too many Covid trackers on resumes lately. Do something that is unique. At the very least, you'll learn something new while creating your own experiences.