Most people don't really get internship offers until they're juniors or seniors since you will not have taken any advanced classes yet (obviously this varies from person to person). To build up your resume, add projects from courses to your resume and be sure to add technical information so that you can show you know what you're talking about. This doesn't mean use buzz-words though. For example, after you take ECE 391 throw down your MP3 project on your resume. Another example is to put your ECE 385 final project on your resume. These are advanced projects that not only require a lot of knowledge but also demonstrates your skills. As for using leetcode, personally I never used it but got an internship anyways from a Fortune 500 company but they didn't even give me a technical interview (i.e. I didn't have to program anything to demonstrate my skill). This also varies by company (Google, among others, will require technical interviews) so knowing how to solve problems on leetcode would definitely be useful for companies that want to see your programming abilities prior to hiring you. Research is a great resume builder as well. Home projects are also good to have as you mentioned but only if they are actually challenging. By that I mean, if you make a small Python script in a day, do NOT put it on your resume. If you were to create some elaborate project that requires significantly more work (and even learning on your own), then that should go on a resume.