30 Days, 30 Hacks: Mastering Your US Master's Journey

You might have come across so many pointers on why internships are important, how to get an internship at a top company, what to do during an internship to impress your manager, how to seek feedback and all these pointers but what is the reality behind all of this?

Most people tend to share the highlights of their internship and then brag their full-time conversion thanking the team and the recruiters in a LinkedIn post as if there wasn’t anything happening in the background, let me use this platform to tell you the reality and how to deal with everything that goes around in an internship.

The very first thing that you are stressed with, post landing in the USA, is INTERNSHIP. You’ll be hearing so many people around you chirping the words leetcode, and internship. Anybody would feel the pressure, I felt it. I always tell people about my first interaction with a couple of folks I met at Texas A&M university, I came to the USA with the thought of enjoying everyday as if it were my last day but every time I interacted with anyone on campus I was reminded that I wasn’t as consistent with leetcode and that I need to have the “Cracking the coding interviews” and “System Design” books on my table; need to invest 10 hrs a day at least in finding patterns in those leetcode questions so I could land an internship. I wasn’t built this way, my motivation to learn things wasn’t to get an internship but to actually start developing complex softwares. So like any other lazy champ, I created a strategy for myself. I didn’t want to sit down investing my day in learning patterns. I guess you could utilize this strategy because it served me well and I do not see any flaws in it (could be because am biased to my thought process).

How do I land an internship with minimal leetcode?

I wrote this down on the mirror with a marker I got from the library (because I didn’t have a whiteboard 😕, it seemed so expensive back then ). I used to look at it, day and night, trying to think of a way and within the next 3 days I got to know about the “virtual” career fair. I was new to the entire concept as were most of my peers. So I prepared myself for the career fair with wasting my time stressing out about leetcode and having a mediocre resume that I wrote with my roommates help. When I attended the interview I figured there were some companies that hire extensively through it while others do not because of visa restrictions (you’ll be shocked to know that 60% companies in these fairs won’t hire international students - dark reality). I researched that small list of companies and targeted the ones with the least amount of interviews and lowest pay per hour. I did end up sitting for 1 interview out of that list and my only technical question was to find the first unique character in a string. I mean even if I never did leetcode I could have easily cracked this. Just to be clear, I had other rounds as well but I tend to ace non-coding rounds with ease. So this ended up being the easiest acceptance I could have in the very first interview I sat for during my semester in the very first month.

Was I happy with this?

For someone who never had a strong hand in leetcode this was the most amazing thing that could happen. I landed an internship before my peers who had 2-3 years of experience. It felt magical, trust me. What it did for me was increased my hunger for learning more. I was satisfied in the back of my mind and happily spent time doing other things that I came to do.

Later when I sat for another interview I realized that it had made me stress free to have an internship in hand and I could easily ace any interview while my peers sat in the interview with grim faces and the stress of securing an internship. Having an internship, no matter how useless (no offense to that company), gives you a mental advantage which I feel is most important in an interview, if you can’t handle the interview stress it is going to be difficult to work your way in a corporate environment.

This is when I formulated the “Start with the Right Internship” point. Target the ones you can easily secure don’t try for “MAANG” (why do we use this buzzword anymore in 2023?) right away unless you are an experienced developer and can tackle leetcode with ease.

But how do you get converted to full-time?

Everybody is concerned with the conversion part and seeing the job market I believe everybody should have this thought on their mind. I mentioned about “Demonstrating your skills” and “Seeking feedback”, well every internship in a top company will start off slow, that is the reality. Half the time you’ll be waiting for someone to provide you access to a resource. I spent 2 weeks trying to get access to the “Data Lake” that I was supposed to work with. Some would have just coasted through this, but I took the liberty to pursue courses that aligned with the team’s product. It really did help me understand the team goals and I was able to align myself to the team’s mentality which most of us miss out on, your manager needs to trust you with the knowledge, it is only then you are deemed to be an asset for the team and the organization.

One other thing that I believe helped me highly was me documenting down tasks for everyday. I used to spend 30 mins at the end of every day (work-hours) to write what I learned today, what I did, what were the results, and if there is anything am blocked on. This helped me communicate the timeline of the project very easily to the team and the leadership. It might seem like a very small step but trust me, documenting everything makes each person in the team accountable. It shows there were tasks which were blocked because of some other factors and not your lack of skill-set.

This document also helped me get feedback on things I could easily miss, my team was well-aware of what had been done, what my next steps would be and they could easily provide feedback on things I achieved the previous day, essentially I never “seeked” feedback I got it because of my “diary-entries” 😛 and I think everybody should practice this. It is a really good experience and you end up making your manager/team responsible for any delays 😂. Also don’t feel like an impostor, most people you come across are going through it.

Well, that was internship conversion 101, also if you are an early careers internship conversion, you won’t have a chance to negotiate - just throwing it out there for you to not be disappointed when you find this out.