How to Land a Software Engineering Internship at Visa | David Peletz
Last summer, I was able to intern at Visa in Austin, TX. I enjoyed working on the Client Systems Analytics team as a software engineering intern and am going to share how I was able to get this internship. Visa is a very large company and the recruiting process may differ from team to team, but I’ll outline what the process looked like for me.
In October or November of 2018, I applied to Visa’s software engineering internship on their careers site. Within a month of submitting my application, I was asked to do a HackerRank challenge. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the specific details of this challenge, as I did it so long ago.
After completing the challenge in November, I didn’t hear back from Visa for a while. I began to think that they’d ghosted me. Throughout several recruitment seasons, I’ve been ghosted by companies hundreds of times and figured that Visa had done the same thing. I figured that my application had gone into their portal and may or may not have been seen by a real person.
At the end of January, things changed. I was shocked to receive an email from a recruiter saying that there was a team in Austin that seemed to fit really well with my background. This team specialized in textual analytics, natural language processing, and machine learning. The recruiter had asked me to give him my availability for the next week so that he could schedule a couple of phone interviews with members of the team. I was thrilled to hear back from Visa and responded quickly with my availability.
Then… a week passed and I heard nothing. After about a week and a half, I received an email from the recruiter asking if I could give him my availability for the next week. I quickly responded again with some times that worked well on my end and he was able to set up two back-to-back 30-minute phone interviews with my manager and teammate.
In these phone screens, I was asked questions about my background as well as some behavioral questions. They seemed to be gaging what it would be like to have me as a member of the team. In the second phone interview with my future teammate, I was asked a quick question or two about Python. He wrote down some code and asked me what the result would be. It was pretty straightforward.
After these two phone interviews, the process was pretty much over. Within a week, I got an email from the recruiter asking to set up a call. At this point, I figured that I’d landed the internship. I doubted that they would call people to tell them they’d been rejected. Luckily, I was right.
On this call, we discussed logistical details, corporate housing, salary, and much more. It felt great to finally get an offer after I’d been applying places and practicing my technical interviewing skills for months. This process involved so much uncertainty on my end and was definitely not how I would’ve expected it to be.
Takeaways:
Silence doesn’t always mean failure: After not hearing back from Visa for several months, I began to assume that they’d ghosted me. This wasn’t the case. Sometimes, companies’ hiring pipelines are backed up. While I didn’t wait around for Visa to get back to me, I was certainly surprised and excited to hear that I was moving along in the process.
Be patient: People are busy. Accept that. While it’s frustrating to not hear back from someone within a few days, be patient. It’s easy to get excited and check your email inbox obsessively, but resist the urge. They’ll (hopefully) get back to you at some point and you’ll be able to continue to move forward in the recruitment process.
Have faith: I applied to hundreds of internships during the recruitment process. It took months of time, energy, and sacrifice. It wasn’t fun. Getting ghosted and rejected was definitely demoralizing. That said, we can always focus on our mindset. Throughout the process, I tried to have faith that I would land in a spot that was right for me. I ended up loving my experience at Visa in Austin and am so grateful that I was put in a role on a team that was working on projects I was interested in. In the end, I definitely felt like this was the place for me.
If you end up applying for an internship at Visa, your interviewing process might look very different depending on the role, team, or location you’re applying for. That said, I hope that this gives you a better sense into what Visa’s recruitment process looks like for a software engineering internship.
