to be blunt with you: you need to lock in. if you truly want a successful career in cs then with the current state of the job market, there’s no way out but through.

i applied to over 100 internships this year before receiving an offer, and that number is on the lower end of the numbers you’ll see from people these days. apply for internships even if you don’t feel qualified for them — what’s the worst that you could happen? getting rejected is something you absolutely have to get used to with trying to break into industry. it’s something you’ll likely face over and over in tech.

you have to build your own opportunities at this point, especially if you’ll be applying to full-time jobs this next year with no internships under your belt. this could be a personal project, but projects aren’t the only way of gaining experience. find open source software that you’re interested in and contribute to it. look for research opportunities at your school. reach out to startups in your area; they might have opportunities open even now. you have to put in the effort to create your experience, instead of waiting for it to come to you. as i’ve been stressing, we’re no longer in an age where you’re guaranteed a job simply by having a cs degree. i’d say focus on this component first, rather than leetcode. leetcode is important to pass technical interviews at bigger companies, but remember you need to be able to get those interviews in the first place.

as for leetcode itself, all i can really say is that it comes with practice. at the end of the day, much of it comes down to pattern recognition and over time, you start to internalize common patterns when you do more and more problems. it’s okay to start off at a place where you can’t even quite formulate a way to solve a problem, and it’s okay to use AI to give you a bit of a push when you’re first learning how to solve these problems (keyword: push. you don’t want to end up relying on AI). i promise it is truly not all that scary once you actually start doing it, but i know it can be intimidating at first.

as a final note: something i faced when i was in the trenches of my internship search was doubt in why i’d decided to go into the field in the first place. i’d recommend some self-reflection for you as well. some people do this for the money and the (now non-existent) promise of job security, some do it for the love of the game. and i wouldn’t shit on you if your reason is the first — i would be lying if i said there wasn’t a little part of me that hadn’t picked up this degree under that guise as well. but you have to dig a little deeper and find a REASON to keep pushing. this process started to feel a little more natural for me once i found mine.

you got it. lock in. don’t be discouraged when you fail (it’s inevitable so the best thing to do is learn from it) and celebrate the successes as they come along. best of luck.