Undergraduates in work-based learning experiences often produce meaningful contributions as viewed by their supervisors, yet report a negative perception of their contributions because they struggled during the process or produced only a few lines of code change. As a result, many omit these contributions from their resumes and job interviews, losing a meaningful signal of technical ability. This study examines how guided blog posts help CS students in work based learning experiences reflect on what they learned and contextualize their experiences. It also evaluates the depth of reflection produced. The study included twenty-five juniors and seniors studying CS at CTCs and other affordable local colleges. All participated in one cohort during Fall 2024. Each student was assigned a simple open source issue to solve from a popular open source project over the course of several weeks with the help of an industry mentor. While working on the project, students drafted a LinkedIn blog post using a five-section outline covering project mission, assigned issue, technical architecture, challenges faced, and submitted solution. We conducted a thematic analysis of the published posts and measured reflection depth using Mejia and Turns's Knowledge Gain instrument. Four themes emerged from the posts: identifying problem solving techniques, growth mindset, the challenges and benefits of collaborative development, and the impacts of their contribution on users. Additionally, students demonstrated deep reflection across all four Knowledge Gain constructs. Structured blog posts offer a low-cost addition to experiential CS learning such as capstones, micro-internships, internships, and apprenticeships. This study is descriptive; future work should compare outcomes against a control group.

Higher education computer science programs traditionally focus on teaching a fairly common set of foundational programming and data structures concepts. While these foundational skills are necessary to prepare students for success as computer science or software engineering professionals, they are often insufficient to engage, inspire, and ensure persistence among the many students from first generation, low income and under-represented minority backgrounds who are pursuing degrees in computer science today. Within most academic programs there is limited opportunity for students to actually practice applying the skills they are learning to solve problems or to work with large existing code bases. Additionally, the focus on learning these foundational skills - often in discrete courses on discrete assignments - lacks the context and bigger picture that allows students to begin to develop a sense of belonging in the computer science profession. Revising the curricula within individual CS departments across multiple institutions to address these limitations would be extremely challenging and time-consuming. A viable alternative might be a scalable, non-institution-specific learning pathway that complements the knowledge and skills covered in most CS curriculum. In that vain, the Computing Talent Initiative (CTI), an institute at California State University Monterey Bay, has been offering a fully online program, called Accelerate, that is available for free to students studying CS from community colleges and state universities throughout California. The team is wrapping up the second year of offering this program, which has demonstrated promising results in helping students develop the skills and self-efficacy to make meaningful contributions to large, real-world software projects.