Do personal projects help with engineering admissions?
Yes. Personal making or programming projects can help with engineering admissions. If you can clearly explain the problem you chose, your ideas, trials and improvements, results, and what you learned, they can provide material to show your interests and thinking in application essays or interviews. However, evaluation methods and the activities emphasized vary by university, faculty, and admissions route, and no project guarantees admission.
Key points
- Be ready to explain the purpose, your decisions, and the improvement process as well as the finished product.
- Keeping the work itself, code, design documents, or experiment notes can make the process easier to explain.
- Reflect on both what you learned and what did not work, not only the final result.
Things to check
- Check the target university’s official application guidelines because the treatment of projects and the materials that may be submitted differ by admissions route.