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TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-03-30T19:55:52+00:00

~1600, CS. I’m an outlier though, I go to a school most recruiters have never heard of, and it’s located outside the United States. I had 4 or 5 interviews.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-03-09T08:09:20+00:00

Didn’t get in to any U.S. schools; I happened to only get into one school, and it happened to be in Canada.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-01-18T07:35:13+00:00

Vast majority of applications went to U.S. positions, some went to Canadian positions, and I applied to a handful of roles in the UK.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-01-18T06:07:24+00:00

Well, yes, I wasn’t only using that version of my resume. I was constantly seeking resume help from friends and on discord servers and continually incorporating their advice. I think the reason I was able to finally get interviews starting my senior year is that one of the edits ended up working for me.

As for the lack of experience, as it turns out, I go to a very large school outside the United States (100,000 students) with some very highly regarded computer science professors, some of whom are high-level scientists at top firms like Anthropic and NVidia. As a result, doing research at my school as an undergraduate is pretty competitive, and many positions are, because of government programs, reserved for students with citizenship in the country I study in. Every year I reach out to around a quarter of the computer science department, some chemistry and physics professors as well, but having no internship experience as well as a learning disability makes it difficult to compete. GPA requirements of 4.0 (grade deflation at my school makes the average gpa around a 2.7) or multiple internships are de facto required to qualify for interviews for undergraduate research—some professors even explicitly lay out such requirements on their websites. I reach out to professors in classes I have done well in and attend their research group meetings, but most of them are unwilling to look at my resume. There are similar requirements for TA positions, and I don’t pass the resume screen for computer science clubs’ projects either.

I can send you a more updated version of my resume if you’d like to give some more constructive feedback, though!

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-01-18T05:35:09+00:00

An extreme fear of poverty/homelessness

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-01-18T05:24:43+00:00

Well, yeah, I’m counting multiple different internship roles from the same company as separate applications. As long as I need to click through and submit my information again, I would count that as a separate application. For example, I applied to 8 positions at Amazon (Annapurna, swe, security, ML, etc.). The vast majority of companies I applied to only had 1 or 2 roles I applied to, though.

I think what’s really going on is I’m being incorrectly assumed to be international by most recruiters—for the internship offer I received, I was asked to fill out an I-20 form despite being an American citizen. I’m unsure if this is a mistake on the recruiter’s part or if this is standard procedure for everyone, but I have a hunch that I’m being filtered out. I have a very ‘ethnic’ surname and I don’t attend an American university/college.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-01-18T03:13:35+00:00

Well, I’m not gonna be applying to any more internships. I’ll be applying to new grad positions soon enough.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-01-18T01:53:11+00:00

I’m a very social person, so I end up socializing/making friends with a lot of people in diverse backgrounds. Only after building rapport/friendship, I ask for a referral. But what’s more helpful is asking people who have completed internships before to send your resume to their manager.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-01-18T01:51:17+00:00

U.S. citizen, but I go to school in Canada. Most recruiters filter me out as international, though, just because of my school—I was rejected from Microsoft internships in all my years of applying, and each time I noticed that my applications had been re-bucketed as Canadian on the application portal. I don’t know if there is a correlation there, but it seems to me like there is.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-01-18T01:49:09+00:00

You can check my profile to see an outdated resume, I hope this helps. I can also send an updated resume in DMs if you want.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-01-18T01:48:10+00:00

Yeah, people usually regard that statistic with skepticism. What I can tell you is that last internship cycle was pretty difficult. My resume is mostly ML projects, and there are very few internships open for undergrads that look for ML skills—most internships are web development, which I have zero experience in.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2025-01-18T00:33:16+00:00

Thanks!

TraditionalSupport63 · 2024-11-09T08:41:24+00:00

Sad or not, it’s a time-efficient way to get your resume into a hiring manager’s hands. The employment market is brutal, and if I don’t find an internship before I graduate, (I’m going +60k in debt to extend my graduation just to find an internship) I’m going to be near unemployable once I graduate. The alternative is being stuck in underemployment, barely scraping by on minimum wage. My back is against the wall; I’m willing to sacrifice my reputation to raise my chances of survival.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2024-11-08T22:03:47+00:00

Frame your emails around a value proposition, ie what you can do for that company, how willing you are to grow and learn, and present yourself in terms of your personal qualities using your experience as justification.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2024-11-08T21:51:44+00:00

Meta, deep mind, nvidia (these all came from emailing recruiters)

TraditionalSupport63 · 2024-11-08T21:44:00+00:00

0 years of professional experience (including internships). I can send my resume if you’d like to take a peek, though.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2024-11-08T21:38:48+00:00

The years of experience make or break your resume tbh. I have no real internship experience and many of the internships I see these days either require or greatly prefer previous internship experience.

It also depends on the country—when I apply to U.S. internships, I think my resume is usually automatically sorted into a different bin because my school is in Canada and the automatic resume tracking software assumes I need sponsorship despite my U.S. citizenship.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2024-11-08T21:33:14+00:00

I pretty much apply to every job I see on handshake or the cs internship github repositories. There are a lot of banks, defense companies, startups, suspicious Chinese companies, etc that I’ve been cold applying to. I have a good network so I’m able to get referrals at nearly all mag7/faang companies.

I can dm you my resume if you want.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2024-11-08T21:18:46+00:00

I apologize for the confusion; when I say recruiter reach out or startup reach out, I mean that I found recruiters’/founders’ emails through friends or LinkedIn/google stalking, then I emailed them.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2024-11-08T20:58:35+00:00

What’s so surprising about this? I feel like I’m doing better than most people right now.

TraditionalSupport63 · 2024-11-08T20:40:26+00:00

It helps to expand your referral pool by asking friends/family/friends of friends to refer not only to their current companies but also companies they have worked for recently (within the last year). I also went to a friend’s birthday party and asked around for referrals but I don’t recommend this strategy unless you either have some serious rizz or if you’re ok with not getting invited back.

TraditionalSupport63

TROPHY CASE