How I landed my first internship at a San Francisco startup | David Peletz
As a college sophomore who had recently declared a computer science major, I knew that I wanted to find a summer internship, but had no clue where to start. In the past, I’d held jobs over the summer and developed some skills with web development and SEO, but I had only taken a few CS courses and didn’t know if I had the technical skills to land a software engineering internship. For the first couple of months, I did what many people do. I applied to as many internships as I could find. I waited around, got denied by some places, and got ghosted by others.
I knew that I didn’t have much experience, so what could I expect? When applying to these internships, I felt like I was putting my application into a black hole and was unsure as to if anyone even saw my resume.
What I decided to do next may come as a surprise: I looked for internships on Craigslist. I wanted to find a way to get my application seen by someone and knew that applying to job postings on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and Indeed wasn’t working for me. I wanted to put myself into a smaller pool of applicants where I wouldn’t be competing with hundreds of others for a role.
While applying for internships on Craigslist, I would always follow the instructions in the job listing to a tee. This was important. Often, we are drawn to taking the easy way out, but showing that you’ve put effort into your application goes a long way.
I soon found a listing for a business development internship at a conversational AI startup called Augment CXM. In this role, I would be able to leverage my web development and SEO skills while learning more about business. I made it clear early in the interview process that I was also interested in data science and was ultimately able to work on some really cool data science projects as well.
Below are some key insights that I gained during my first internship search that I’d like to leave you with:
Leverage your past experience: You don’t always have to jump right into the role you want to be doing. I was interested in working with the business team and I also wanted to work on data science projects. I landed the internship because of my SEO and web development skills, but I was able to work on data science projects as well. Without leveraging the skills I had, I wouldn’t have landed the internship and had such an incredible summer experience at this startup.
Get creative: Do what other applicants aren’t. I don’t think that many of my peers were looking for internships on Craigslist. Try to find ways in which you can put yourself into a smaller applicant pool. This can mean trying to find different online job boards, but it also means leveraging your own network. Getting a referral will put you into a smaller applicant pool.
Don’t get discouraged: I wasn’t able to land this internship until April and I had applied to so many places. I was only a sophomore and I often felt that I didn’t have the experience to land a role that I truly desired. As hard as it can be, try not to let this get to your head. Keep moving in the right direction. Focus on making yourself a better applicant: develop portfolio projects, fine-tune your resume, practice your technical interviewing skills, and do whatever else you can to become a more skilled candidate.
Focus on quality, not quantity: It’s easy to fall into this cycle where you just submit your application to every internship posting that you can find. For me, this did not work. I found that it worked better to give my full effort to fewer applications. As tempting as it is, submitting generic applications all over the place often doesn’t work out. Go the extra mile. Show these companies why you want to work there and that you put the time and effort into your research.
