Navigating the Fall Recruiting Season as a Freshman

Actors in the movie “The Internship” portraying Google interns.

If you’re a new freshman in Computer Science, the fall internship recruiting season is likely the first time you’ll be applying for a real job. The process of recruiting for your dream internship seems long and hard, and most people aren’t quite sure what to do to get ahead. It can be pretty daunting and overwhelming to suddenly have to put a resume together that effectively showcases your skills and experience, apply to a melange of companies, and then finally, ace a technical interview. There are so many things to think about and conflicting opinions about the right way to do them!

As a Junior in a prestigious Computer Science program, I thought I’d offer a bit of my accumulated advice and expertise to those going through this for the first time. These are just some basic tips to help you get that internship you’ve always wanted and work your way to being a rockstar engineer!

• When interviewing, the answer is probably a hashmap. If it’s not a hashmap, it’s probably a Dynamic Programming problem and therefore probably not worth your time to figure out.
• If you feel like an interview is going south, it probably is. Don’t sweat it though! You’re just not smart enough to work there.
• Make sure you ask your interviewer no fewer than 15 questions. The more of their time you consume, the more they’ll like you. At first they’ll be annoyed but they’ll come around once they see how insightful you are! (Seriously, this is science. See Mere-exposure Effect).
• Writing a resume is the hardest part of applying to tech internships! Recruiters and hiring managers are naturally attracted to things they don’t understand! Use words like “cloud-native” or “containerized” to make experience on your resume REALLY stand out.
• A recruiter only spends like 2 minutes on each resume so they really need to POP to be noticed by recruiters. Use at least 4 fonts and 6 colors on your resume to make sure it’s distinguished from the rest. The last thing you want is to come off as boring, right?
• If you don’t have enough experience to put on your resume, then it’s ok. Just make some projects up! If your interviewer asks you about them, just be vague and talk generically about it. “Yeah, we used webpack as a module bundler to minify and serve all the dependencies.” See how easy that was! Basically any string of words from Hacker News should work fine, so get searching!
• Assert your dominance over your school’s CS community by staying in your school’s labs as late as possible and providing unwanted advice to people working on class or personal projects. The best measure of your ability as an engineer is the number of people who think you’re a good engineer, so be sure to help everyone you can find!
• As soon as you get an interview somewhere, it’s important to share it on Facebook so all your friends can see. Remember, you have to remind them you’re better than them (but subtly, ofc).
• Interviewers want to see examples of your intellectual prowess. There’s no better way to convey that than by talking about your understanding of Functional Programming. Try interviewing in Clojure or OCaml. Chances are, they won’t understand your code, but they’ll be so impressed with your language choice they’ll assume it’s right.
• Career fairs are great places to meet recruiters and get your foot in the door. They’re usually pretty crowded though, so make sure to get there no less than 6 hours before the fair opens. Alternatively, fake an injury and get a wheelchair so people feel bad for you and let you skip the line!
• Internships are like 3 month long tests for a job. It’s important you work as hard as humanly possible to show the company you’re REALLY committed to the company’s culture and engineering problems. If you’re not putting in 100 hour weeks, you’re not doing it right.

That’s all I can think of right now. I hope this was helpful for all the freshmen out there doing this for the first time. There are lots of companies out there hiring interns, so don’t worry too much if you’re not recruited right away or get an offer somewhere subpar. The company you work for matters far less than the work you so don’t focus too much on where you’re going to be working unless it’s not Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Amazon. If you’re not at one of these companies as a freshman, there’s probably no chance you’ll become a good engineer and your career is likely shot. Good luck recruiting, everyone!

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Thank you to M, J, S, and T.S. for reading drafts of this.