Foreword
Being an international student, interning in the summer to apply the skills I learnt in grad school was really important to me. Moreover, I believe that this internship could be the foundation of my future career experience. Landing myself a summer internship was a lot of work and it certainly had not been easy.
After giving tonnes of interviews in companies like Adobe, Bloomberg, Google, Lyft, C3.ai, Turion Space, Shop Canal, DoorDash, Invitae, Quora, Galileo Technologies, Tapad, Confluent and facing a lot of failures I managed to get internship offers from Uber and Amazon.
How to ace the internship hunt process
1. Apply early
The process of finding an internship can take months. Compared to my fellow peers, I started applying for internships quite late (around September end). At that point of time, few of them had already secured internships. There isn’t typically a right time to start applying for internships but I believe you should start applying as soon as your Fall semester starts.
2. Apply with referrals
Sometimes simple networking can acceralte your internship hunt process. If you find a role you think you are well suited for, reach out to Alumini or employees of the company on LinkedIn. Explain to them why you are suitable for the role and see if they can help you out. Though a referral does not guarantee an interview it doesn’t harm applying with one!
3. Practice LeetCode questions daily
According to me, this step should have the most emphasis. LeetCode is the most efficient platform to improve interview-style algorithms problems. Especially if you are applying to software development roles you will have multiple DSA rounds and LeetCode is the only way out! (P.S: Research/ Applied Scientist roles also tend to have one round of DSA.)
4. Plan for backups
While applying to internships keep in mind that if you apply to 200 roles, you would maybe get a call back from 20 and offers from 2. Although this depends entirely on your skill-set and you might have a few comapnies in mind that you would want to work for, having backups always help.
5. Give mock interviews
Giving mock interviews would help you come up with perfect answers for scenarios presented to you in Behavioural rounds. You can practice with your fellow students or you could also register on platforms that offer mock interviews.
Afterword
After a lot of deliberations, I decided to join Uber as a Software Engineering Intern at San Francisco this summer. I will be working in the Maps Engineering Team and I am super excited to get started.
If you have questions on the interview process of any of the companies I mentioned or if you have any other questions feel free to reach out to me. Good luck on your internship hunt! ✨