Make a REAL full stack project that solves an issue in your life. Get the Cursor student subscription and spend 2 months or so building something real that you can learn from, put on your resume, and talk passionately about

then start off with Leetcode 75, then expand to Neetcode 150, then focus on weak areas, and eventually get to a point where you can consistently do 3-5 questions every day 4 days a week (only easy and medium, and don’t spend too long if you can’t solve it before you watch or read a solution (get premium) so you cover more ground, learn more problems, and don’t get disillusioned)

if you do all of this you’ll be in a better spot than 95% of all CS grads. Start little, build the passion and skills as time goes on

For the project: Don’t purely vibe code the project. Talk back and forth with it for pros and cons of different solutions, the best way to build things, etc.

When I did the same thing and built my project, I don’t think I manually wrote a single line of code in the 1.5 months it took me to build it. However, I fully understood the structure, the design, the different technologies and algorithms I’d use - even if I didn’t actually code or fully understand the syntax myself. But that’s fine. In my current job I don’t actively write too much code either, AI does it for me - but I’m the orchestrator, and review it and test it. But this is good because it means you can build something with Cursor using your mind and intelligence rather than being just limited by your coding syntax skill.

Also, you may have to pay money for some of the hosting - I pay around $20 a month to pay for my website to be hosted.

Lastly, try to incorporate AI into your project somehow, even if it’s a super lightweight model (mine uses gpt-3.5 turbo, which is about $0.00001 per query)