Internship Hunt – Part 1

As I was close to wrapping up the program, I started taking the job hunt more seriously. I didn’t have any professional software development experience so I thought an internship would be a great starting point. I had a few reasons for choosing to apply to internships over full time permanent positions. Here are some of my thoughts:

The competition for internships would be smaller as they usually accepted only current students.

I had the opportunity to try a specific industry and team without a long term commitment.

Interns typically have lower expectations than full time employees. This was important to me as I knew the learning curve may be high for me due to my lack of professional experience.

After applying to many postings, I landed my first interview for a Software Development internship! I was thrilled! To prepare for this interview, I practiced problems on Leetcode and answered the typical behavioral questions. I thought I was well prepared. Spoiler: I was not prepared at all. The interview did not go as well as I expected and unfortunately, I did not get the job.

Although I was bummed that I wasn’t able to land that internship, I acknowledged that it was my first technical interview and it was still a great learning experience. Here are some of the key takeaways from that interview:

Takeaway #1: Ask your interviewer questions about the interview ahead of time. In the job posting, one of the requirements was having an understanding of Java. During my preparation, I spent a good chunk of time refreshing my knowledge of Java as I thought I would be asked to code in Java. However, in the interview, I was allowed to solve the problem in any language. I could have prepared more efficiently if I knew this before the interview.

Takeaway #2: Solving problems on Leetcode by yourself is different than in an interview. I realized that solving coding challenges in an interview is a whole new ballgame. In the interview, it’s encouraged to talk out your solution while working on the problem. Since I wasn’t use to this, there were long stretches of awkward silence while I was trying to solve the challenge. This was definitely a skill that I had to improve in order to have a stronger chance of securing an internship.

This has been the first part of my internship journey. I’ll be discussing some resources I used to get better at interviewing in my next blog post. Please look forward to that!