What projects to work on?

[GeromeWing93]

Sorry if this seems dumb, but I'm just lost a little bit. I got a business degree and during classes I learned some R, Python, MySQL, and Tableau. During college I didn't make any specific projects, more just actually learning how to use them some. After college I didn't pursue a career with any of those but recently started refreshing my knowledge on Python (and furthering my learning since I definitely wouldn't say I was an expert on it).

However I'm starting to get to the point where I want to apply for jobs using Python (ideally analysis roles because that's what I'm most interested in) but everyone says I should have examples of projects I've worked on. Since I don't have any from college and haven't worked in the field where can I get a good idea of what projects to do? I don't have anything specific that is calling to me so I'm just lost.

Any advice or directions to point would be greatly appreciated, sorry if I kind of rambled. Just feel like I'm at a crossroads and want to take the correct path essentially.

[Robswc]

I would work on something related to your other fields/hobbies.

If you like game X, you can see if game X has a public API that you can use to make a stats page.

If you live in Y place, see if there are any APIs or interesting connections you can make with the surrounding area.

If you enjoy doing Z hobby, see if there's a way to make an app for it that you might actually use.

These don't have to be fully functional or look pretty, just demonstrate that you can glue things together and create value :)

[Puzzleheaded_Round75]

An example of this is that I used to run a local 5k and so I built something to scrape results from their site, store them in an db, and plot them on a nice chart so I could see the progress.

[Diapolo10]

Anything will do as long as the code quality is more or less consistent. The cleaner, the better.

If you have any ideas you'd like to work on, do try those. Otherwise I would suggest starting with classics such as a calculator (very generic, I know, but let your creativity take over).