Why you should aim for an Internship during college
Tags: College, Jobs, Entrepreneurship, Programming, Self Improvement

Why you should aim for an Internship during college

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During my first semester in college (I’m currently in my 8th semester) we were given a couple of talks about our “future”. Some of these were about internships, and since that moment I’ve been doing my best to get such an awesome opportunity.

Right now I’m in the host matching phase of the Google internship recruitment, there’s not much I can do but occasionally send an email to my recruiter and wish for the best. Once this process is over I’ll probably write about it (either if I get it or not), but today I’m writing about how my effort in attempting to get one of these internships has given me so many other opportunities and hopefully, made me a better developer.

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Practice

I believe this is the most obvious perk of trying to get an internship. When one is selected for the recruitment process, one must pass a bunch of interviews in order to stay in the game, however, one must consider that there are thousands of people being interviewed for the same position, so one should have remarkable performance in such interviews. Some people manage to achieve this without much effort. I was not one of these people, I spent a ton of hours a week going over Cracking the Coding Interview and LeetCode , and it was worth it.

Yet being selected for the next round of interviews isn’t the only perk of such an amount of practice, in time I began to realize that it was easier for me to solve some problems or develop algorithms for my projects.

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Projects

As a recent college student, during my first semesters, I had no experience and my resume material was close to being nothing. So, in order to fix that I began building the habit of developing projects, at the beginning they were for mere resume purposes, but then some of them took an entrepreneur approach, some of which are choose.computer my online tool to help people find an adequate laptop based on specific needs, and Galaxy Boy , a mobile game I just released a couple of days ago which now has over 2,000 users (I’ll probably write about it in the near future).

Other than those two, which are my “big projects”, I have around other twelve smaller projects which help my resume look better. So if you are like me during my first semester and you feel like there’s nothing you can use to fill your resume, maybe you should try developing some projects, and hey, maybe one of them turns out to be a goldmine!

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Experience

After having some projects attached to my resume, the one area I felt a little bit empty was the “experience” area, so I began searching for a part-time job, which I found in just a couple of months. I began working as an Android Developer and in a matter of 8 months, I became a tech lead! I won’t lie, in the beginning, it was quite challenging, I was the noob of the group and I had to learn from everyone but I like being challenged and facing tasks above my skills so it was just a matter of time for everything to stop being so difficult.

I left after 10 months of working there but I’ll always be grateful for the opportunity they gave me and I truly recommend you to do the same, you’ll learn a lot, you’ll find fun and intelligent people and you’ll have some income which maybe you can use to do another project!

Photo by Marleena Garris on Unsplash

Conclusion

Getting an internship is indeed a hard task but it’s one that can turn out to be of many benefits in the future. Yes, there will be failures (I attempted to get into Microsoft 7 times, one into Uber, Google, and Roblox. My first game, Kings of Wings, cost me all my savings and it hasn’t sold near half of it), but I guarantee that it’ll all be worth it and hey, there’s no better time for you to take risks than when you are in college.

Thanks for taking some time reading my post, I’m no professional blogger but I like to share what I think might help others. If you like what I write and want to read more about what I do, I invite you to subscribe, and if you want me to write about something specific feel free to let me know in the comments below.