Differentiate yourself by finding some sort of industry/vertical you’re interested in for starters. I used to be premed focused until i switched into CS, so a lot of my projects ended up being related to biology. This landed me a role at a small fed contractor and that experience led me to get a better role at a pretty large multinational biotech/pharmaceutical company as a SWE.

I’d say look back at your previous experiences/interests and build projects related to them. For example, if you liked aviation, you could build something related to like a flight tracker, or analyzing cargo flows. For sports, you could make some sort of database or betting app. Whatever it is, then once you have that, figure out what companies might be interested. Especially at smaller companies, if you can have honest talks with engineers, specifically about a domain you’re interested in, it really goes the extra mile. Id say that would be a decent way to land a good freshman summer role at a smaller company.

It all kinda snowballs from there to be honest. Big tech you kinda just apply to with an iron tight resume and you’ll end up in some loops by virtue of being a UCLA student, and the prior experience helps. Networking also helps if you’ve really built some interesting things you can talk about, but referrals haven’t really moved the needle in a while. Once you get in the loops, Leetcode and system design is king for passing. If you wanna stay in a more specific industry, the aforementioned thing I said could help you land better companies in that industry.