A Tale of 100 Rejections: The Road to Finding My Summer Internship

As a junior Computer engineering student, this summer is a “make it or break it” in my career, and like any student I decided to start my internship hunt.

The typical thing to do is to send the resume to everyone, every company and the typical response is (if any): “Thank you for applying but your qualifications doesn’t meet the job’s needs”.

Long story short, it’s a series of rejection, one after the other. At that time, it only made sense to do some analysis. Here’s what I discovered:

1. Sending the resume and praying that someone would read it isn’t the best strategy. It would be a lot better if someone could refer you.
2. The computer engineering field is so broad, so a resume for an embedded systems internship shouldn’t be the same for digital signal processing or software engineering. That was my first mistake.
3. “Do I gain experience from an internship or should I gain experience to get an internship?” This is the ultimate question.
4. Not getting a review from a specialist. I was actually surprised to know that my University has a a Career development center that offers career guidance and resume review session. I booked one and it truly made a huge difference in my CV/resume.
5. “I’ll just apply to everything.” This is probably the biggest mistake I’ve made because this creates distraction from what I truly want. For now I’ve decided to focus on Machine Learning and started the Coursera specialization track.

After the analysis, I adjusted a few things here and there, and decided to be more focused. I hope that these changes have a positive effect on my internship hunt.