A personal website for recent graduates

The advice usually given to graduates building a first website is the same advice given to everyone else, adjusted downward: fewer projects, a shorter About section, the word "aspiring" somewhere near the top. That advice fails for a specific reason. A senior professional's page has to select — it has years of material and the job is choosing which three things represent the whole. A graduate's page has no material to select from. There is one dissertation, one or two coursework projects, maybe a part-time job that has nothing to do with the field. The problem is not editing down. It is that imitating a senior page's structure with none of a senior page's substance produces something that reads as thin rather than modest.

The honest starting point is what the reader is actually doing when they open a graduate's page, because it is not what they do on anyone else's.

No history means the reader is screening for something else

A hiring manager reading a mid-career page is verifying a track record they already partly believe, because the CV made a case and the page is the follow-up check. A hiring manager reading a graduate's page has no track record to verify. There isn't one yet. So the question the page has to answer shifts from "is this claim true" to something closer to "can this person actually do the thing, and will they follow through when nobody is checking on them." That is a question about capability and initiative, not about accomplishment, and it changes what belongs on the page more than any cosmetic choice does.

Initiative, specifically, is doing a lot of the work here, because it is the one signal available to a graduate that is not also available to every other graduate applying for the same role. Everyone in a cohort has broadly the same degree, broadly the same core modules, broadly the same grade band clustered in the middle. What is not broadly the same is who went slightly further than the assignment required, on their own time, and can explain why. A page that shows that costs the reader thirty seconds to recognise and tells them something a transcript cannot.

One project, done properly, beats five that are thin

The instinct when you have little to show is to show all of it — every coursework assignment, every group project, every half-finished side idea — on the theory that volume compensates for youth. It does the opposite. A grid of five two-line project cards reads as someone padding an empty page, and the reader's attention divides by five before they've understood any single thing you built.

Pick the one piece of work that came closest to something real: the dissertation with an actual finding, the group project where you can name the specific part you owned, the personal project you kept working on after the module ended because you wanted to know what happened next. That last category matters more than it looks like it should. A project that continued past the point it was required is the clearest evidence of initiative a graduate page can carry, because nobody assigned the extra weeks.

Then show it with process, not just outcome. What the brief asked for, what you actually built, one decision that didn't work and what you changed, what the result was. A reader who sees the decision that didn't work trusts the finished result more than a reader shown only a polished screenshot, because the failed attempt is the part that can't be faked after the fact. This is the same instinct that makes a strong portfolio without client work credible rather than thin — the substitute for a paying client is never volume, it is showing the work rather than describing it.

Coursework and the dissertation need translating, not linking

A dissertation abstract is written for an examiner who already has the context and thirty minutes to spend. A hiring manager has neither. Linking the PDF and calling it done is a polite way of ensuring nobody reads it.

The fix is a short rewrite: two or three sentences on what the actual question was, what you found, and — this is the part graduate pages usually skip — why it might matter outside the department. Not every dissertation has an obvious external angle, and forcing one is worse than admitting there isn't one. But if the research touched something a reader in industry would recognise — a method, a dataset, a tool, a problem shape they've seen at work — say so plainly. Keep the full document linked underneath for the rare reader who wants it.

The same translation applies to individual modules. "Advanced Statistical Methods" tells a recruiter nothing. "Built a model that predicted X from Y using Z, and it beat the naive baseline by this much" tells them something, even from a coursework assignment, because it describes what you did rather than what you sat through.

Part-time work: include it, but for what it proves, not for its title

The retail job, the bar shift, the summer of admin — the instinct is either to hide these entirely or list them the way a CV does, as a chronological line with dates. Neither is right for a one-page site with limited room.

The test is whether the job proves something the coursework can't. Two years managing a till and a rota under a difficult manager is real evidence of reliability and handling pressure, and it is worth one honest sentence saying so. A single summer of unrelated filing work is not worth a section of its own. What doesn't belong is a defensive paragraph explaining why the work is unrelated to your field — nobody assumes a graduate's part-time job was their career plan, and explaining that assumption away spends space you don't have on a question nobody asked.

Getting a page up before applications open

Timing works against most graduates here. The page that would help most is the one that exists before the first application goes out, and that is precisely the moment when finishing a personal website competes with finishing a degree. The realistic outcome for most people who plan to "build a site this summer" is that summer ends first.

This is where a CV-based generator changes the timeline rather than the content. reach takes the CV you have already written for applications — the same document, not a new one — and turns it into a finished one-page site in about twenty seconds, live at a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes. The advantage for a graduate specifically is that the hardest part of this whole exercise was never the design, it was getting from nothing to a first draft; reach removes exactly that step and leaves you with something to edit rather than a blank page to fill during exam season.

It also has limits worth stating plainly rather than glossing over. It builds one page — one index.html, no sub-pages to grow into later when you have a proper portfolio site underway. There is no CMS, so a graduate who expects to keep adding projects every few months will outgrow it rather than build on it. There are no analytics, so you won't know whether anyone is actually looking. And saving in the editor overwrites the previous version with no history — there is no undo to an earlier draft once you've moved past it. None of that makes it the wrong tool for a first page done fast; it makes it the wrong tool for a page meant to be a permanent, growing home for your work, which is a different project for a different year.

The order that actually works for a first page

Put the one substantial project first, with process visible, above anything else. Follow it with the translated dissertation or coursework finding, two or three sentences, not the abstract. Add the part-time work only where it proves something specific, in one line. Close with a way to reach you that a stranger can copy into an email without typing your name into a search bar first.

What every version of this page is arguing, whatever the field, is the same claim a personal site organised around a profession's actual expectations makes for anyone at any stage: that you did one thing carefully enough to explain how you did it. For someone with three years of shipped work, that claim rests on choosing the right project out of many. For a graduate, it rests on making sure the one project you have looks like it was actually finished — the same discipline, applied to less material, and no less convincing for it. The same logic holds even in fields where the finished artefact is someone else's language rather than a build, which is why the conventions for a personal website for translators end up asking for exactly the same kind of proof: not a list of qualifications, but one sample, done well, with the reasoning shown.