Building up a good portfolio - Suggestions?
 

Just finish my first year of uni (it wasn't worth the £3k if you ask me) and i need some suggestions on what to do to beef up my portfolio, I am applying to some voluntary groups that need some help with web development, even though that's not my major.

Since I am doing a sandwich course i have to start applying for placements next year and i need to do something within this summer that will make my resume stick out from the rest.

Any suggestions for projects or anything similar are welcome.

What's your major? I'd recommend sticking with something directly related to that rather than something that doesn't matter as much.

get active in a programming community like a source forge group or FSF.

I think probably the most important factor is to think about what sorts of places you'll be looking for as your placement and see if you can pick up relevant experience of some kind there. For example if it's likely to be database development then I'd play with a few database servers (MS SQL (euch, but everyone seems to be impressed by it still), MySQL, Postgres - Oracle if you can get your hands on it!) and try to do a database-driven website for one of your voluntary group sites or build some other small database-driven application of some kind for someone; maybe a student body (e.g. student union) could use something?

I'm getting carried away with the database development angle here but the key point is to try to find opportunities to do something like what you intend to do in your placement. If you can arrange to do a little project like this with a few (reliable, hard-working) friends potential employers for your placement (and for your career in the future) will be impressed if you can deliver a project as a team. And if it's an extremely trivial project, so much the better; you can always exaggerate this later as they're unlikely to check up and it improves your chances of delivering on-time.

That's my advice. Relevant experience and working as a member (or better yet, leader) of a group of developers on a small real-world project will impress. It was that sort of thing that impressed my current employer at my interview I suspect.

Edit: Oh, and if your Uni's anything like mine, second year is a good couple of gears up and far more interesting!