How to Land a Tech Internship Because You Can — Part I
Intro
So you want to know how to land a tech internship? Wish they taught you that in school? Me too. Do you find yourself googling for resume templates? I once did.
Looking back to when I was in college, I often wonder how I pieced my resume together and landed an internship at Facebook. To be honest, I did not know what I was doing back then. There was no obvious source of guidance available at our school or on the web for that matter. However, over the course of the last few years, while working as a software engineer at Facebook and Uber, I had plenty of opportunities to recruit both interns and full timers. Now, having been on the other side of the table, reviewing 150+ resumes and doing 60+ software engineering interviews, I know a bit about what works and what doesn’t. I want to share this knowledge with you that I wish I had when I was in college to help you succeed landing an internship.
This is going to be a 3 part series covering the main steps you need to take to land an internship.
Part I: Preparing yourself for success by learning the basics. (You are here)
Read this if you want to know what fundamental Computer Science knowledge you will need for an interview and internship.
Part II: Selling yourself. Resume.
Read this if you want to know how to get experience if you have none, how to beef up projects and structure your resume.
Part III: Finding Opportunities.
Read this if you want to know how to find opportunities, do cold reach outs, and get responses.
Part IV: Preparing for and Nailing your interview.
Read this if you want to know what to expect at and how to prepare for a software engineering interview.
Part I: Preparing yourself for success
Know thy “basics”. You must have basic Data Structures & Algorithm (DSA) knowledge.
This is a minimum requirement for most software engineering interns. Why should you care? Basic data structures and algorithms knowledge is required if you want a strong foundation on which to not only build your path to becoming a software engineer or a computer scientist, but also to nail your interviews.
On the job, you will utilize basic data structures and algorithms everyday. Think Lists, Arrays, Strings, Maps, etc. As a software engineer, I use one of these everyday. The stronger a foundation you build, the easier your job will be, the better you will do at your internship, and the higher chance you have of landing a full-time job at the company later on.
Additionally, most software engineering internship interviews will consist of questions that require DS&A knowledge to answer. This is especially true at top companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, etc. Your interview questions may not always explicitly ask you to implement a data structure or an algorithm, but you will almost always end up using a data structure or an algorithm to solve the problem.
Ok, so you are ready to learn the basics, where do you start?
You want to make sure you have a good overview of the top fundamental topics covered in Data Structures:
Algorithms, Arrays, Collections, Complexity Analysis, Graphs, Hashtables, Heaps, Linked Lists, Queues, Recursion, Search, Sort, Stacks, Trees
Here are some awesome resources to get started:
- BeeHyve: Data Structures & BeeHyve: Algorithms — a student community with crowdsourced data structures and algorithms resources from around the web
- Geeks4Geeks — tutorials, examples of high level Data Structure topics
- VisualAlgo — awesome visualization tool of many algorithms
If you find following a class format, lecture format better for learning, here are some classes from different universities:
- CS 226 Algorithms and Data Structures
- Brown CS 16 Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures
- Stanford CS 166 Data Structures
- CMU CSE 15–211 Fundamental Data Structures and Algorithms
- University of Washington at St. Louis CSE 241 Algorithms and Data Structures
- Harvard CSE 22 Data Structures
- Michigan EECS 281 Data Structures and Algorithms
- Cornell CS 2110 OO Programming and Data Structures
- MiT 6.006 Introduction to Algorithms
Read through these sources, practice examples, and make sure you fundamentally understand these topics. Brush up on any areas where you feel like your knowledge is weakest.
Stay tuned next week for Step 2: Getting the experience. Selling Yourself on Your Resume where we will discuss how to find job and internship opportunities and sell yourself to recruiters!
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!
- Submit your resume review request here.
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
EDIT: Correcting e-mail: friends@beehyve.io
