VIDEO: How to Get an Internship According to Interns

So walk us through how you landed the internship. So my journey to TA (TechnologyAdvice) involves a beautiful moment of serendipity. I had graduated from my coding bootcamp and was actively looking for jobs. I randomly got a message through slack from my bootcamps organization from a current employee who said that she had reached out to my coach at the bootcamp and said, are there any students that you had in the last cohort or so that was a standout?

I put in my application. I had a phone interview like the next day by Monday. I went from being super destitute and like, I'm never going to find a job to one thing worked out in my favor and I'm grateful. I found this internship on Handshake. I had created a cover letter already to go and then I clicked on the like apply externally button on handshake where I actually just had to write like three short responses. So I’m like, “Oh, I could have just spent time on those short responses.” And then from there is a pretty standard interview process.

I heard back, probably like a day or two after I applied for a phone screening, and then a few days later I had the second round interview, and then after that I got the offer. I actually landed this internship through a career fair, and they were matching my my tempo. And I said, okay, I'll apply. I applied the internship application process seamless. Everything was great. And then the more people I just kept meeting, I realized, okay, I kind of want this job, okay, I really want this job.

And then when I was given the offer, I was like, yeah, I'll take this job. So a little bit different. It wasn't the typical I found you on LinkedIn. I found you on whatever website. I actually was lucky enough to meet with them in person. So go to your networking events. They matter. Honestly, at the time, I felt that the job market was like kinda hectic. I was becoming quite disillusioned with like normal things like Indeed it was just so it wasn't even like hearing back from people.

Eventually I made a LinkedIn account and that ended up being where I found the most success. That's also where I saw the listing for this internship. A good rule of thumb, is that you can like see how many people applied and the lower the better. Obviously, don't be discouraged. Always let them reject you. Don't reject yourself. but I remember seeing a specific job listing, and I was in the back of my friend's car, and I looked at it and I was like, this is the one I'm going to get.

I said it out loud, and here I am! Like, it’s what I got! So I just took like maintaining that attitude. So this started about a year and a half ago, and I’m at a crossroads with my current job and tired of the industry. I've done it for eight years. I need something different. And after daily searches on LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Handshake, I saw an opening for a content video editor position, which throw everything to the side that was the one I wanted.

So I made sure to do the steps necessary, like flipping my resume, taking out some of my old restaurant jobs, and putting it in with experience in digital marketing and social media content creation, those type of things. From there, I had a series of meetings and then one more interview later. We had the job. Back in college. I applied for this analyst intern role, and I did so through Handshake, and I had about 3 to 4 interviews before the offer was given, including a technical interview.

And throughout these interviews, I touched base with hiring managers, data analysts and the business intelligence manager prior to starting. I wish I could tell you that I worked hard to get the internship and I struggled and sweated, but actually, I spent the last couple of years trying to get into the software engineering role. Then last year I decided to go back to school and get a degree. And the school itself had, like a, like, a job board kind of thing called Handshake and TechnologyAdvice was on there.

And at a whim, I just, you know what, I'll send my resume, I’ll apply. I had zero expectations to get a call back. Believe it or not, they call me back the next week and it's like, “Oh, you want to, you want an interview?” I'm like, “Yeah, I guess.” It was, I want to say luck/fate that I got it. There was like, there's quite a bit of time of, like, leaving my job, going to a bootcamp, taking a lot longer in that boot camp just because, you know, this is all new and fresh to me.

After that, it was really kind of a finished, finish to end in February. So between that time, all I was doing was like going to meetups, applying for jobs and, making projects. So those three things over and over again. That's all I did. Lord have mercy. Like I said, it was quite a journey in getting here. I came from a previous internship doing, like, software engineering. I found out quickly that's not what I wanted to do. And then I started looking for other positions for my resume.

Yes. Lots of tweaking to my resume. Anytime I could, like, get and tell you how many times I updated my resume. But then I was watching, like y’alls web pages, the TechnologyAdvice site web page and the product intern came out. I applied, I got pretty far in the first interview and then I didn't get it. I let myself wallow in it for a little while and then got a callback, maybe a couple weeks later, that something happened here. And I got this internship while the product team and the reason I took the internship is because, yes, I could have done what I wanted over here at my previous job where I was also interning.

I wanted here because I knew there was people that were seasoned already, and I could learn a heck of a lot more from them.