How to land your first internship offer? 👶🏼
“Everyone around me seems to be preparing for competitive coding or stacking up internship offers from big name brands” — fellow mentee at ADPList. This is followed by “How do I land my first internship? Is it even possible given how competitive it has become? How did you do it?”. So here’s an attempt at answering all these questions that I often hear from university graduates who are unsure how to navigate the maze of internships.
My Story
My first official internship [official as in on paper] was in June 2015. It was my summer break after the sophomore year 🇺🇸 [2nd year] of Bachelors degree in University of Mumbai. I always wanted to get a job in the USA and work in the “land of dreams” 💭; to explore what the hype about the world’s superpower is all about and experience it first-hand. Internships, I was told, would play a key role in landing an admit from one of the top educational institutions in the States 🎓.
Prior to 2015, I worked as a trainee with my dad’s computer technician friend post my 12th grade examinations 🧑🏼🔧. The nature of that summer training program however was less about actual software and more about computer hardware. It was also an unofficial arrangement, i.e. nothing on paper for me to show-off. I was involved in doing miscellaneous tasks such as fixing system boot issues, reinstalling Windows operating system, cleaning up RAMs 🧹, trouble-shooting Windows desktop applications ⚙️ and the like. While it didn’t teach me much as far as coding or computer programming is concerned, I did learn how difficult working in real life can be in terms of physical and mental effort. I was age 17 when I learn’t that.
Over to my first brush against real-world programming. It was in 2015 summer, that I first entered the world of technology with Quickwork. As I look back now, 7 and a half years later, it was the point of inflection that launched my career as a software engineer / developer🚀. Admittedly, I didn’t perform to the best of my abilities, as a n00b undergraduate student with very little practical knowledge about software design and coding. However, those 6–12months of engaging with stakeholders, founder and founding engineering team would go on to make a lasting impression in my mind about how to think about programming and how software gets built 🧱.
Why internship?
Apart from looking good on the resume, an internship serves lots of purposes 💸. An internship helps you get a taste of how the theoretical knowledge about computer science gets applied in the real world. It uncovers the harsh reality of “productionizing” code 🛠. It exposes the gap in your understanding of foundational computer science knowledge. Moreover, I feel, internship lets you gauge whether your interest in “Machine Learning” or “Blockchain” or “Cyber Security” is actually worth pursuing or not. Often times, the information we read in books 📚 and tutorials about a certain new domain doesn’t reflect the ground reality. In such instances, it’s better to get a taste of how it’s like to really “work” in that particular field / sub-domain and evaluate whether it’s a good fit for you or not. Data Science tutorials and assignments often belie the hidden troubles of real-world data science problems. It is believed that upto 80% of data scientists day-to-day job is sucked up by cleaning 🧼 , preparing, preprocessing or filtering the real-world data to make it ready for use. Would you be fine to do that? Think 🤔.
How to get in? 🚪
“If you know the why, you can live any how.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
I operated in a completely different landscape of internships when I was looking for my first break into the tech sector 🪜. The platforms, types of internships, companies in 2015 in Mumbai have since evolved into better, bigger or different alternatives. Nonetheless, I’ll try to highlight some general principles to adopt while thinking of internship applications. Hope this helps.
I’d primarily focus my effort in striving for internships along these 3 dimensions
- Multinational corporations
- Startups
- Open Source Organizations
The approach for each of these 3 types of internship organisation is a bit different, given that they are looking for different things.
Internship in MNCs
MNCs tend to have a well-established process around internships. The companies leverage this process as a primary source of recruiting full-time employees. An internship allows the company to thoroughly test the prospective employee in the context of the specific organisation. Internship, in that sense, is like a litmus test, the highest level of signal any company can gather as far as employee’s fitness is concerned. An internship, from the company’s point of view, is basically an exercise in answering the question — Is this intern a fit for our team/organisation/company?
What are MNCs looking for in an intern?
I’ve observed that the internship role description is generic enough, to not reveal any trade-secret or business-critical information. Moreover, the expectations are on the intern possessing high degree of proficiency in certain languages. You’d commonly find Java, C/C++, Python for traditional SDE/SWE Intern role or latest web development technologies in case of Web Dev Intern role, listed in the job description. MNC internship recruiters tend to be picky about big brands on the resume i.e. either famous educational institutions in the country or previous experience working in famous companies/open-source organisations. The absence of big brand names makes it a bit difficult to get selected past the “resume screen” round, though there are exceptions to this.
Internship in Startups
Startups tend to not follow a rigorous process in terms of recruiting interns. This is highly subjective though, so take it with a pinch of salt. An early stage start-up is less likely to have a long-drawn interview cycle. It’s because the start-up has other higher priority concerns to take care of. For them, interns are quick and easy way of helping them achieve the MVP [minimum viable product] or the required milestone for the seed round. This doesn’t imply that the bar for “getting in” is low. However, the odds are, you’d be evaluated based on “passion” and “willingness/desire to learn, adapt and deliver” over “longstanding, hard-core professional experience”.
What are startups looking for in an intern?
In a startup environment, the expectation is that an intern can soak in the chaos and bring skills that are “immediately” required by the team. If the team needs to stand up a website, they’d call on a front-end [better still full-stack developer] to take over the responsibility and land a fully functional website in 4–8 weeks. If the team needs to work a specific feature, required by the investors to raise the next round of funding, an intern would most likely be called on to support the development of that feature. This would mean you’d have to demonstrate proven ability [through Github projects or open-source contributions] or the agility in terms of ramping up on new technology quickly.
Open Source Organizations
When I was looking for internships back in 2015, I wasn’t fully plugged into the open-source world. As a result, I missed out on applying for interesting opportunities to contribute to open source code, so early in my tech career. However, times have changed and I believe the penetration of “open source’ has grown deeper. I remember 3 of my under-grad classmates ended up interning in top open-source organisations. After hearing their experiences, I was mighty impressed and disappointed for missing out, at the same time.
Notable summer coding opportunities include
- Organisations participating in the GSoC
- FSF — Free Software Foundation
- X.org Endless Vacation of Code
- Major League Hacking Open source Fellowship
- Summer of Bitcoin
- Season of Docs by Google
- Outreachy
- Season of KDE
More detailed list maintained in this GitHub repository
Where to apply?
I find this question to be particularly odd given that the search engines obviate the “discovery problem”. Regardless, I’ll list down a few ways I’d go about applying.
- Company websites
- Recruiting Platforms
Company Websites
Most MNCs would fit this category of applications. The best way to apply for MNCs is most likely through their own careers/jobs page. However, before doing that, you might want to consider couple things
- Referral from your first/second order connections on LinkedIn
- Reach out to company recruiters on LinkedIn
If these two options don’t bear fruit, I’d definitely give the company careers page a go.
Recruiting Platforms
Most early-stage startups don’t have their own dedicated careers page. It’s just not worth the hassle, maintaining a separate page and the entire application process. Instead, there are recruiting platforms which are tailor-made for this purpose.
In India 🇮🇳, in 2015, we had internshala. It’s still very popular.
In the UK 🇬🇧, I found few options
LinkedIn has this cool feature of “easy apply”. I’ve seen lots of peers receive full-time offers with their applications made through LinkedIn. I’d make sure to update my LinkedIn profile with all the projects, certifications, professional experiences, blogs/articles. Once the profile is up-to-date, I’d apply to all these companies with easy-to-apply.
