Totally do-able things to get that internship/job

Working in the industry is an excellent way to complement your academic experience when you’re at the grad school. Spring semester is usually when most of the students find themselves at a point, where they are looking for a job and might feel lost about how to go about it. I am writing this article to help you get started, and boost your choices of finding an awesome place to intern/ work.

This article is based on my experience as well as all the tips I gathered mainly from my seniors, blog posts and different articles I read about the topic. Most of it is heuristic but I think having it in one place might help, hence here we go.

( The assumption I am making here is that you are a graduate student in the Computer Engineering/ Computer Science. Although most (not all)of the tips are generic in nature, so feel free to read on!)

TL;DR —
1. Keep applying — LinkedIn Jobs, angel.co, builtInAustin, HN,
2. Network with seniors, friends from school & college, recruiters — LinkedIn
3. Create an awesome web portfolio to showcase you — like this, this
4. Contribute to open-source—GitHub, Mozilla

So let’s break this down into multiple parts

Job Applications

There are almost infinite opportunities of various kinds. So, in my opinion this is the part where you are lacking if you haven’t got an internship yet. You are definitely a talented individual,all you need to do is keep applying to positions that interest you and showcase your skills to employers in a better manner.

Loads of companies have generic posting which fail to describe the role completely. This might be because that role is cross listed for a multiple number of positions. So, you might actually be a right fit. Be carefree and definitely Apply Now.

Refferals play an important role in making sure your resume is read by a human and not just automated keyword matcher. Call up all your seniors, ask them what they are working on (sometimes its really fun stuff that might spark your interest) and tell them what you’re working on. This conversation will help them think about opportunities they know about that are suitable for you. People are always happy to refer a good fit. So, do not shy away from asking for a referral. While you are sending them your resume for a referral, you can also ask them for their opinion on your resume (Another opinion always helps.)

Networking on LinkedIn (if you haven’t updated your LinkedIn, please stop reading, and go do that first!) is extremely important. Ping all those friends from your school you had added, ask them about relevant opportunities.

Recruiters are on your side, that’s literally their job, so don’t delay connecting/messaging/inMail to them.

I also subscribed to newsletter from builtInAustin, builtInBoston which were a good source of work done by startups in that region.

Last but not the least, download the LinkedIn Jobs app (I am slightly irritated as to why this is a separate app from LinkedIn).

Lucky is when opportunity knocks your door, but then you have to knock enough doors for the same!

Resume

There are thousands of ways to get this right as well as wrong. I am just going to mention some of the key points that I feel are important-

1. Having an objective makes the recruiter’s job easy (mention what you want). You could make it sound peppy to add some flavor and personality. I use this -
   Extremely interested in building the tech of tomorrow, looking for full time roles starting Month’ 20XX
2. Don’t mention everything you’ve done, keep it short but relevant. Use power verbs. Add numbers (%decrease in downtime). Highlight your skills. Use keywords.
3. Fancy Templates are a big NO! — Unless you are going to be working on UI/UX or front end roles. I recommend this because many of the fancy templates might end up garbling your descriptions and might not be parsed correctly by ATS (Applicant tracking systems — read the point below.)
4. Keywords — Sadly, your resume has to first defeat the power of AI (automation mainly), to get noticed. Your resume should contain enough keywords to match the job description to reach an actual person for further review.
   Make sure you pass your resume through various keyword generators to see what keywords are you generating. You can use jobscan, leap.ai and others like those.
5. Review, Revise, Reform — Ask everyone you know for an opinion on your resume. Go speak to your college’s career counselors, they always give useful advice on resume formatting and word usage! (VT Folks can go here)

Here is a great comprehensive guide that present tips on writing resumes by Ben Hilburn. Some more tips here.

Web Portfolio

Another important, but neglected fact is that when you’re applying for a job, you are basically becoming a salesman for a product that is you. So, it is extremely important for you to put yourself out there.

One page of paper is never enough to describe your skills and achievements, so hyperlink it to your portfolio!

My web portfolio : abhinuv.dev

So, yeah, I think it is extremely important for everyone to maintain a online portfolio of their projects, achievements, courses and everything other that they want to mention to a possible employer. Creating this web presence is extremely fun, and you can go all out in being creative here. This creativity is what attracts unique opportunities. So go and create a web portfolio like this, or this or this. Its a great space to link your projects, present your blog, showcase your publications or just a nice archive of things you’ve worked on.

GitHub offers username.github.io as a default host for a web-page which is fairly easy to setup. Other options include wix, wordpress or blogger. If you are looking for front-end roles, designing this page showcases your skills and command over web-tools. Either ways, it shows your creativity since you are the sudo in making this look awesome! Make sure you add the link to it in your resume, also don’t forget to add your resume on this web-page!

In addition to that, make sure you have a updated LinkedIn profile. You should create profiles on
1. your college’s job board (VT uses handshake)
2. angel.co — great job board for startups
3. read hackernews — its a great platform for all things tech

❤ Open Source

This is another great way to showcase your passion for coding and productive involvement in large scale projects. Start contributing to projects, libraries and tools you use on GitHub (if you don’t have a profile, you know what to do from this point onward…..). Start with documentation changes, one line code changes, start writing tests, and then slowly move towards feature requests, bugs and other complex issues.

Getting involved in open source is really helpful when you’re a student because

1. You get to experience the workflow of a large scale project which is usually only possible once you join the industry.
2. You get good hands-on experience with DevOps tools like Jenkins, Git, Bamboo, pyTest, Flake etc, because almost every major project uses some or other form of automated testing.
3. Learn from the best — The community is extremely friendly and helpful towards a newbie contributor. They are always helping you get started, or point you in the right direction if you’re stuck on a particular problem while solving an issue.
4. Its awesome. You are literally contributing towards something larger than life. (think matplotlib, numpy — level big)

Another thing you should definitely do is start following some awesome lists, some active members of the community(people I follow), star some good projects (my stars), fork them and send useful PRs.

So, keep refining your resume, create an awesome looking web portfolio, subscribe to newsletters, contribute towards open source and last but not the least keep applying. Best of luck! You’re 100% awesome and unique, you just need to show it to the world!

Feel free to ping me on questions regarding the same. I will try to help you or atleast point you in the right direction!