How To Land Any Tech Internship Because You Can — Part II

Building Experience. Selling yourself. Free Resumes Reviews!

Published in

BeeHyve

7 min readJul 28, 2017

Knowing Data Structures & Algorithms fundamentals alone won’t guarantee an internship. You need to show that you can apply these fundamental principles to solve problems by coding. Once you can combine your fundamental knowledge, experience, and the ability to sell yourself, you will have set yourself up for success in tackling internship and job opportunities.

How do you show this? The most ideal way to show this is by having internship experience. This is important because it demonstrates that you can work with a team and execute on a project. But, how do you get experience without having experience?

PS. If you haven’t read it yet, make sure to checkout our blog post on the first step of landing a tech internship. Also, as part of running this blog series, we are offering free resume reviews. Read on, my friend, read on…

Experience — chicken meet egg, egg meet chicken.

Why does experience matter? One, you will be coding with a team at your future job — because that *is* your job as a software engineer, so it’s not enough to just take a Data Structures class in school and be done. Majority of your time as a software engineer will be spent coding “projects” that just happen to be features or cool parts of an app, website, or perhaps, a self-driving car (hello, future 👋). You have to show that you can apply what you learned.

Previous work or internship experience is the golden egg.

If you have previous experience as a software engineering intern, that’s great. Now you just need to sell yourself on your resume.

But, what happens when you are starting out and you don’t have experience? Most companies want experience, but to get experience, you have to get hired by a company. It’s the greatest chicken and the egg problem a student faces, let’s be real.

Note on trying to get internships at top tech companies (Facebook, Google, Uber, etc). Keep in mind that most top tech companies (Facebook, Google, etc) have high resume volume. This means that the environment is competitive, and this will at minimum require you to have previous internship experience. That is the unfortunate nature of how it works. Projects may not be enough. If your goal is to land an internship at a top company, you need to get real internship experience to increase your odds. This may mean you may need to spend a summer elsewhere first. It’s still possible to get an internship without experience, but it’s hard. However, both Facebook and Google do offer freshman programs that don’t require previous experience.

So what are some steps that you can take to build your experience ?

Projects: Beef up your technical experience by doing side projects. Then apply to many, many companies and take that as an opportunity that will become your internship experience for next time.
Hackathons: A lot of companies sponsor and recruit at hackathons. If you do not have any internship experience, this is also an alternative path to landing an internship opportunity. Find your next hackathon opportunity here: mlh.io or hackalist.
Work for smaller or local company or for free (temporarily): Working at the FB, Googles, and Ubers of the world is not your only choice. There are plenty of awesome local, smaller companies out there in need of your help (Beehyve is one!).If you are having trouble landing an internship in general, offering your work for free is a great way to get an opportunity.
If you have tried something, and it’s worked for you, e-mail us at friends@beehyve.io! We would love to hear your story.

Projects

This is critical especially if you have had no previous technical work experience or internships. Do a side project, participate in a hackathon or a programming competition.

If you have some projects under your belt, that’s great. I’d recommend hosting them on github, bitbucket, or some code repo if possible. Make sure to add this experience and emphasize it on your resume if you do not have any technical internship experience.

Don’t have any projects? Where do you start? Come up with some cool idea you have been thinking about and just go and do it. The steps aren’t hard. There is no trick. Your motivation and execution are key. Some ideas include:

Create a portfolio website for yourself.
Create a mobile budget app.
Create a random lunch spot generator.
Create a website that pulls all internship opportunities based on personalized criteria ( and then e-mail us friends@beehyve.io 😉 )

You pick. To help you get started:

Mega Boilerplate — Use this to get you started on building a website. It sets up a lot of the boilerplate code after you pick out the frameworks you would want to use. A good exercise would be to go through and learn about the frameworks.
Stackoverflow — Has great starter guides on how to start working on Android or iOS.
BeeHyve Web Programming — We have an entire community of student crowdsourced resources for web programming.

Working for smaller, local companies and for free

If you have the time to do this, do this over projects. Not only will you gain true internship experience, but you will also have a leg up on what it is like to be part of a team and work at a company.

There are a lot of startups in the Bay Area that are in need of help! Trust me, I know from experience. They may not be able to pay you as much as the Facebooks and Googles, but you will probably learn really diverse skills working at a startup that you wouldn’t at a big company. If you can gain valuable experience at a smaller company, you will have a great shot at bigger companies if you so wish.

If you are having trouble landing paid internship opportunities, offer something of value for free to those companies! Reach out and ask them if they’d be willing to take you on for free. Yep, if you offer immensely valuable skills like coding for free, people will take you up on that offer apparently — Who would have guessed?😎 In return, you have an internship experience that will help you land an even better opportunity in the future. Sometimes you got to give before you can get. (Shameless plug. Looking to get experience and interested in helping BeeHyve? email us at friends@beehyve.io)

Resume — where your sale skills meet your hard work.

At a high level, a resume is a combination of your sale skills and hard work. You want to convey how you are the best fit for a given opportunity. You must come at this from the perspective of the recruiter. What will they need to see on your resume? Follow this general rule: A recruiter will spend 30 seconds looking at your resume.

Core sections to have:

Education with Expected Graduation Date: Recruiters need to know if you are looking for an internship or a full-time opportunity.
Work or Internship Experience: This is the most important part of your resume if you have it. Use bullet points for clarity and answer the following questions: What did you do? What technologies did you use? How did it impact the team?
Technical Projects: Showcase your projects separately. Use bullet points for clarity and answer the same questions you would for your experience: What did you do? What technologies did you use? How impactful was it? (ie. if a mobile app, is it in app store?)
Skills: Briefly list out skills, languages, and frameworks you have worked with. This doesn’t need to take up a lot of space on your resume. You can customize it depending on what job you are applying for.

There’s a lot to write on the topic of resumes that I won’t be able to cover in this post, however, we will be writing more in-depth on this topic over next few weeks as a separate blog post.

Stay tuned next week for Step 3: Finding Opportunities where we will discuss how to find job and internship opportunities, sell yourself, and start preparing for interviews.

Get your resume reviewed for free!

#OFFER

As a part of running this blog series, we are proud to announce that BeeHyve is offering free resume reviews! Our team consists of engineers and product managers from Facebook, Uber, and Microsoft. In total, we have reviewed over 300+ resumes, and are offering to pass our knowledge to you.

#ASK

To get your resume reviewed by me and the team:

Sign up for BeeHyve at www.beehyve.io. We ask that you give our community a try. It will only help you prepare for your interviews!
Add one awesome resource to a community of your choice.
Send an e-mail to friends@beehyve.io with your resume, your BeeHyve username, and the resource you shared on BeeHyve.

Disclaimer: Unfortunately, unlike Oprah or the genie in a bottle, we can not guarantee that you will get a job with our resume reviews or by just reading this blog.

Author: Vera | LinkedIn