Programmer Humor

have a personal social connection

if you're not landing internships via your college then you're attending a shit college. my old school has Google, Meta, OpenAI, Apple, Microsoft, etc setting up mini conventions on an annual basis hoping to snipe some UofW fresh grad to exploit.

My first internship I kind of landed by talking to a company representative at a career fair organized by my university and then mentionjng said guys name in my online application. Not sure how much impact that actually had but I guess it might have helped.

My second internship I found via linkedin. I just looked for companies there that had somilar positions or actually posted internship positions and then went to their website to apply and look for possible other open positions I could send a slightly altered letter from my first application to. If a company sounded interesting but didn't have any internships on offer I sometimes just sent them an unsolicited application. Honestly I don't remember how much feedback I got on those though.

Should be obvious but I also didn't limit myself to looking for companies close to where I lived at the time. In the end I had to move literally to the other end of the country.

The college I went to R.I.T. has a co-op program. They require co-op blocks but give you the tools to find them with career fairs. Companies flock to our college for students. Once my foot was in the door as co-op for 8 months I turned it into a full time job (14 years ago).

You'll hate it, but honestly I went for (cyber engineering) a consulting internship, led to a full time offer at the firm which i eventually turned into a really good position at my client