2024 summer intern record

Briefly speaking, the end result wasn’t very good 😢.

After posting 400+ applications, I just received 3 interviews (the turning rate is not good either). Unfortunately, for now, I got 3 rejects, which means I didn’t get an off-campus internship in 2024 summer.

I feel like there are mainly four factors hindering me securing a summer internship, they are listed as below.

First, I started really late. After I arrived America in August 2023, I was curious about the surroundings and try to get used to the new environment (It’s actually my first time abroad 😢). I started my job application at late September or early October (couldn’t remember clearly). At that time I just finished my first draft of English resume; while other candidates may started their job applications process even before arriving the US (maybe in July).

Second, I didn’t start my job search with enough clarity. My undergraduate major (information management and information systems) contains many aspects. To be honest, the skill set I am most familiar with is actually for web development and software engineering. However, my master program focus more on data science. So in the first half of my job application, I just blended them all, I applied many kinds of positions, such as data analyst, data scientist, data engineer, software engineer. My resume is also mixed them all together, which didn’t reflect me deep dive in a specific area, I guess it is a big reason for the low interview turning rate.

Third, I’m not familiar enough with some of the concepts in my area of specialization. When I was having an interview for software engineer position, I was asked to explain CI/CD and how I used it in my previous work. Unfortunately, I didn’t prepare well for this question and I can only answer that CI/CD represents continuous integration and continuous deployment. It is not surprising I got a reject since it seems like most of the work requires dealing with the pipeline.

Last but not least, the job market is really harsh this summer. There seems like a lot of layoffs from last year’s winter, and many strong candidates with lots of years of experience for an internship position. For example, one company I applied told us in slack that there 3500+ candidates for three positions, it is actually a really small-size company (2-10 employee), which is really crazy. However, I don’t want to totally blame the job market since many students in my program got their summer internships and there are still a lot for me to improve.

I also want to point out some unpleasing parts of my job application process, for a software engineering intern position of Company I, I was asked to develop a website and record a video to introduce it, I also need to share my code. The process will only move further after I pass the evaluation. To be honest, I spend a lot of time on it while working on the tasks from school. However, all I got was a rejection letter without the recipient’s name. I tried to cold email a hiring manager from another tech company, there was also a task before interview 😢. Another experience is AI interview, which is really new to me. For Company P, I was required to chat with an AI interviewer to implement the interview process, but the AI’s tone of voice is very unnatural and very fast, with no pauses at all. I just feel like it is kinda distraction for me to do the code task. For me, I prefer a real person interviewer.

So here it is, I will stay in campus to do a part time job and do some researches where I can work as a web developer, which is also good for me. Although the summer internship seeking seems like a failure to me, I feel like for now all I can do is continuing improving myself and hoping the job market will be better in the near future.

In the end, it would be great if you can buy me a coffee, it will inspire me to create more contents such as sharing more details about job seeking in the future, some tech stuff, and my life. Thanks for reading 😊.