
What kind of project should I present so that I could stand out during the interview?
Having a great project to present is important in an Interview. Although it might not be the most vital element to succeed in an interview, it is definitely a plus to stand out among other candidates.
However, before getting into the details on how to find some great ideas for your project, I will tell you why this matters during your interview.
Imagine that you are one of the candidates competing for a data scientist role. You might be worrying about the technical or machine learning knowledge questions to be asked during the interview. Thus, you put a lot of effort to revise your lecture notes or keep googling to answer any doubts that suddenly pop up in your mind. You are trying your best to swallow all the knowledge before stepping into the interview room so that you will feel more confident.
During the interview, the interviewer bombards you with a lot of tough questions, and you start sweating. You are getting more and more anxious and hence, most of the interview questions you are just trying to guess. Eventually, in your mind, you are thinking, oh my gosh! I am going to fail this interview. Thus, you are thinking very hard to figure out what questions to ask before the end of the interview so that you could leave the interviewer a good impression about you.
Now, if I tell you, there is a way to minimize the questions being asked by the interviewer, so that you stand a higher chance to pass the interview. Will you be interested?
Instead of letting the interviewer keep asking you questions that are out of your control, you can let him ask you the questions which you have already well prepared. You may ask, how can I do that?
You will need at least a well-defined project, which is not a school project, and at least it is somehow interesting to be discussed. Therefore, you just need to prepare all the potential questions which they will be asking you during the interview. If you are smart enough, you can intentionally leave out some key points of the project for them to ask you.
If your project is interesting enough and you are well prepared, most of the time of the discussion will be occupied by the questions related to your project. Now, let’s start with a quote.
All ideas grow out of other ideas – Anish Kapoor
Ideas on what problem to solve actually are not that hard to find. Sometimes, you may not notice that some of the problems you are facing in life, or some questions which you are curious to find out. Those questions are already considered great ideas or problems to start with.
In this article, I will be showing some of the ways where you can find some interesting problems to solve.
1. Past projects
If you are interviewing for a fin-tech company and you have done a fraud-related project. Bingo! You can just present the project but do make sure that there are some aspects which you think are value-added to that company.
However, if you think that the specified project you have done is not good enough, or you have some ideas on which area to improve, please do that! This is because this might be a chance for you to shine.
For instance, for your existing fraud project, you just use some of the normally used features on the internet and apply it to your model. But now, you have a feeling that if the person has a profile picture on the platform, he or she will have a lesser chance of making a fraud, do try it! Although most of the time it may not be a great feature, just show the interviewer that you do have some out-of-the-box thinking skills and they will be interested to understand how you do it!
This is because feature engineering is like a combination of experimenting and having the domain knowledge. Thus, if you think the feature makes sense, try it!
2. Existing ideas on the internet
If you haven’t read about my article on Airbnb which is also featured in Tech in Asia, do click on this link.
Here is how I came out with this idea from the internet. There is a website which is so-called InsideAirbnb. I found that most of the projects that can be found on the internet regarding Airbnb are using the dataset from this website. Interestingly, Malaysia’s dataset does not appear there.
Thus, if I were to scrape the data from Airbnb by myself, and perform the analysis, this will be a great idea. I not only can show that I am able to perform the entire flow by myself (from gathering data, analysis, and modeling) but also to provide value.
The gap here that I had identified is the lack of Malaysia’s dataset and the value that I am able to provide. The value here I mean is to provide Airbnb’s investors a way that they could find out which area they should invest in.
In short, if you are able to identify a gap in the problems which you are solving, this will definitely make your solution looks more interesting.
3. Real-Life Problem
This problem may be faced by you or even your friends. The extra value which I provided in my Airbnb article is actually the problem faced by my friend. He asked me if there is a way to solve this problem and I took the challenge.
Besides, you can tackle some doubts you are having. For instance, you are interested to know which company is having the largest market in Malaysia’s car market and what will be the sales for next year for each company. Follow the three steps I mention in my previous article, identify and formulate the problem, then perform analysis and modeling.
Not only that, you are more than welcome to solve the problem you are currently facing. If you are solving the problems that you are facing, you will have a deeper understanding of the problem itself. Therefore, it will be easier for you to come out with some features which will be useful for your model.
Final Thoughts

Ideas are cheap. Ideas are easy. Ideas are common. Everybody has ideas. Ideas are highly, highly overvalued. Execution is all that matters. – Casey Neistat
Ideas are cheap, execution is all that matters. Thank you so much to read till the end and see you next week!
About the Author
Low Wei Hong is a Data Scientist at Shopee. His experiences involved more on crawling websites, creating data pipeline and also implementing machine learning models on solving business problems.
He provides crawling services that can provide you with the accurate and cleaned data which you need. You can visit this website to view his portfolio and also to contact him for crawling services.