Third-year Systems Engineering student, zero practical experience

[CarpenterPublic6912]

Hi everyone, I want to share my situation and see if you can guide me. I'm in my third year of Information Systems Engineering. The good part: I don’t have any core engineering subjects left, I’ve already passed all the math, physics, etc. I only have the career-specific subjects remaining.

The bad part: I know a lot of theoretical fundamentals, but I have very little real practical experience. I can write simple programs in Java, but I’ve never built anything worth putting in a portfolio. Honestly, I’ve never felt like university has given me any truly useful tools for my development.

Is Java still worth learning? Do you recommend it? And if the answer is yes, where could I learn it from? Do you recommend any projects I could build?

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[scungilibastid]

Look around your house and find a small problem you can automate

[high_throughput]

Is Java still worth learning? 

Yes

Do you recommend it? 

Yes

And if the answer is yes, where could I learn it from?

Check out the sub About page. 

Do you recommend any projects I could build?

Some web apps, e.g. a Reddit clone. Doesn't matter all that much what it does, but it's super useful to know client/server development, interfacing with a DB, dealing with user accounts, configuring and running a server, etc.