How to get an internship at a Big Tech Company

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Getting into a tech company can be a daunting task. However, it is not as difficult as you might think.

Broadly speaking there are three individual components to the process:

  1. Being Qualified: Having the experience to be a good candidate for the role you want.
  2. Getting Noticed: Your application should be selected amongst the sea of other applications.
  3. Interviewing: Crushing the interview process, whatever it is for the role you're shooting for.

The great thing about this framework is that it breaks down the process into three discrete parts that you can work on in parallel.

Getting Qualified

Broadly speaking this is the past experience that is relevant to the role you want. There are many ways in which you can develop the experience you need to be a good candidate for the role you want. You could have a previous internship, personal projects, class projects, youtube videos, blog posts, etc. Regardless you want to work on developing relevant experience so that you will be a great candidate!

One of the best ways of figuring out what experience to obtain from the position you're in right now is by having an informational interview with someone that has the role you want. This actually relates to the next point!

Getting Noticed

If you are applying to some of the largest tech companies, you might have a hard time getting selected amongst everyone that is also applying to the same role. This is because applying online is something is relatively easy to do, and at the same time everyone that applies online gets dropped into the same bucket. There are a cuple of things you can do in order to boost your changes of etting noticed and going into the interview cycle.

Getting a referral:

If you are a university student you reach out to alumni working at the company you are applying for set up a call, talk about your onjectives, ask for feedback on your resume, personal projects, and experience. After talking with them once or twice you can ask them for a referral.

You can say something like the following:

If you are comfortable with it I would like to ask you for a referral to the company.

It's my experience that if you are a student from the same university, highschool, or country of origin of the person you are asking for support they will be very likely to help you out! There are a lot of people willing to help out there!

Conferences:

Tech companies really want to help out students from under represented groups to increase their diversity levels, this is a great opportunity!

Here is a list of possible conferences that you can look at:

  • SHPE
  • NSBE
  • Grace Hopper
  • Afro Tech
  • Out in Tech
  • Greylock Techfair
  • Tapia Conference
  • Dev Color
  • Girls in tech
  • Society of Women Engineers
  • NACME

Diversity programs:

Just like there are diversity programs there are also diversity programs that prepare you for the interview process and have a recruitment component!

  • CodePath
  • Code2040
  • Students Rising above
  • Power to fly
  • Girls who code
  • Upwardly Global
  • TechWomen
  • Women in Produt

Recruiting events:

Often times, particularly in tech hubs like SF, Seattle, NYC comapnies will host recruiting events, if you search for events in your area you might get the chance to meet recuiters and apply to a company ahead of time or into a different application pool!

Interviewing

The Objective here would be to be able to increase your chance of landing the internship given that you obtained the interview. This means that even if you get 4 interiews you want to have practiced enough to get 3 or 4 offers.

In order to acomplish this you want to really know what the interview process looks like for the kind of role that you are applying for.

For example, software engineering interviews consist largely of technical questions otherwise known as leetcode problems. Getting proficient at solving these problems will increase your chances of crushing the interviews!

Here are a couple of free resources:

It will also help a lot to practice behavioral questions and technical questions with friends such that you also become comfortable with the actual process of interviewing.

There are a lot of videos on YouTube to get an idea of how the process works.

Conclusion

If you work deligenlty you will increase your chances of getting the internship of your dreams!

Focus on the process of getting qualified, getting noticed, and interviewing.

If you want to change your story, change your actions first. - The Practice by Seth Godin