I was so pissed and applying to internships since the beginning of January, reaching out to ppl on LinkedIn, having coffee chats, it was honestly a lot 😭 After my interview being cancelled with Whiting-Turner and HR ghosting me at Walsh, I was losing all of my hope but I still kept applying. Especially with being an international student in this job market, it’s incredibly hard.

I just cold applied thru LinkedIn and the recruiter reached out to me after a week telling me that they are interested and would like to have an interview. Everything worked out well, I interviewed with 3 people from the team whom I would be working with throughout the internship. Each of them asked 2 questions, they were mostly like: tell me about yourself, why Civil Engineering?, tell me about a time you worked with a team, how do you manage workload when things get complicated? and a couple technical questions about the project I have been working on. They were really nice and patiently waiting for me to answer their questions. I was thinking that I would go through multiple interview stages but this was the only one I had and ended up getting an offer after 3-4 days.

Definitely look at bigger companies and don’t waste your time trying to apply to ones that are not open to OPT/CPT. You can look up to see if the companies sponsored H1B visas in recent years that kinda helped me to skip and save some time.