Disclaimer: These are my own thoughts and lessons. This article is not to brag but to share my honest reflections and advice in the hopes that this will help other students and young adults.
I was fortunate enough to have been offered Summer 2020 internships from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, but in the end, I turned them all down.
First, I’ll give you a bit of background about me at the time of these offers. I was just starting my sophomore year at Brown where I study Computer Science, Applied Math, and Economics. I had never coded before college and was very intimidated by CS when I first started out; I actually nearly dropped my first CS course a couple of weeks in. Luckily, I stuck with it and improved with practice, and the courses I took in my freshman year that helped me prepare for recruiting in my sophomore year were Object-Oriented Programming (Java) and Algorithms & Data Structures (Python & Java).
I didn’t have an internship for the summer after my freshman year, partially because of my age — I started college at 16, but that’s a different story — and partially because I wanted to go home and see my family that summer.
The Resume That Got My Foot In The Door
Without any internship experience, my resume was still able to get through screening from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, as well as other competitive companies like Salesforce, Bloomberg, and Two Sigma to name a few. For those interested in tech careers, I can tell you what recruiters said made my resume stand out despite no industry experience.
- If you are looking for a technical role, put your coding languages at the top. Why? There are thousands if not tens of thousands of resumes to screen in the first round of recruiting, and the people who do that first screen are usually in HR. They are trying to see whether you fit the job description they posted, which means, at a minimum you need to know the language(s) the position requires. Putting your languages at the top makes it super clear, quick, and easy for the screeners.
- If you don’t have a lot of relevant experience, _get involved on campus and/or do side projects. _Why? The fact is that companies want experience, which creates this catch-22 when you are trying to get your first position. To overcome this, you have to have experience in some other form. I put down my involvement with clubs on campus as well as personal projects and meaningful school projects. It doesn’t have to be anything to fancy.
- Really important: Quantify your impact. This is a big one. An Amazon executive told me that my resume was better than some of their peers because I clearly quantified my impact. For example, if you are on the executive board of a campus org, instead of saying something like “I grew club membership”, say “I increased membership signups by 20% from the previous term”. Numbers catch the eye and make your impact super clear.
#computer-science #facebook #google #interview #microsoft
