Internship | Realistic Advice
Hi everyone, I'm new here. I've read rule #1 but still want to understand Theo's point about internships in his tech jobs 2024 video. I've been looking for advice everywhere, but mostly get vague tips like "use your resources" and "make projects." I need more specific advice.
I started my CS degree in a non-EU European country in 2020. The first two years were online, and I struggled to keep up. Now in my fourth year, I'm behind, with credits equivalent to a second-year student. My focus has been more on cs theory and software engineering design, and I've avoided web dev with all my might. As a result, I don't have any projects to show for my time in college (like at all).
I've applied to a couple of internships, and while they always like my soft skills and say that I'm a perfect culture fit, my technical skills lead to rejections. And it's starting to hurt. My experience includes a short time at an IT startup (mostly focused on B2B relations and acquisition) and some achievements like a machine learning paper and winning software engineering competitions. But these haven't helped me get an internship. I realise I need to work on practical projects, so I plan to build a .NET MVC webstore with Angular after exams.
I'm still figuring out where I fit in the IT world. I'm considering web development as a start because it seems versatile and I get to work on a lot of different things. I'm looking for realistic advice on what to expect and the best steps to take, as I'm feeling extremely lost.
Solution:Jump to solution
In that case the obvious answer is what you're already planning on doing: Working on a project. The gap from roughly knowing an idea to actually implementing it is massive if you don't have enough experience in doing.
Pratical skills like implementation is basically only improved upon by doing, not by reading, thinking or whtieboarding...
6 Replies
I mean no one is in your exact position but I can give it a shot at least. Im curious about you winning software engineering competitions but still apparently lacking technical skills for internships. What does that mean? What kind of competitions have you entered and how have you failed technical assessments?
I mean more along the lines of architecture design and systems design now the actual coding and such (I know how things work in theory and design theory I'm also really good at pitching and presenting systems). Of course I failed to mention that I had an amazing team both times and we all worked together to win. The competitions we're focused more on systems design than actually product competitions and afterwards selling the idea to the committees.
On the second question of how I failed. I'll give you two examples. In one example we we're supposed to create the back-end logic of a web game in teams of 2 for the interview (where each team had a mentor and he evaluated our performance both teamwork wise and coding wise). The back-end was is python (I had applied for a java position but they put me in a python group). In the end we solved the challenge and we had presented the right logic to the mentor every step of the way, but when it came down to actually implementing what we were thinking in code he had to help us at each step. In the end it wasn't sufficient.
More recently, I got rejected after 2 interviews with HR and a final round interview with the CEO and founder of the company. We talked for around an hour and he really seemed to like me as a person. But when he got to what projects do you have to show for yourself. I blanked, I told him everything I had done to that point, but no actual web dev projects came up, since I haven't built any. In the end I got rejected after a week, saying it was my technical skills. From that experience I learned that I have no idea how to sell myself in terms of my technical skills, so gots to improve on that as well (have no idea how 🙂 )
Solution
In that case the obvious answer is what you're already planning on doing: Working on a project. The gap from roughly knowing an idea to actually implementing it is massive if you don't have enough experience in doing.
Pratical skills like implementation is basically only improved upon by doing, not by reading, thinking or whtieboarding
Yeah fair enough. To that extend before I mark this as solved. Are there any tips or advice you'd give to someone with a CS background that is wanting to do an internship?
Honestly, if youre good on the CS side, just go aggressively practical. Build stuff, deploy. Get it out into the world so anyone can theoretically use it (even though its not about getting users of course). Its good to go all the way from idea to deployed, working prototype at least a few times
Thank you