Freshman - Amazon OA, Viasat Phone Screen, +2 Other Unautomated OA's after ~200(?) applications

[cold cloak]

Hi! I'm a freshman at a a T15 who has been applying to internships for a while and don't seem to be passing a lot of screenings, with I'd say around a 2% response rate and none from freshman programs. I'm in SoCal and also an unpaid intern software engineer intern at an AI startup, which isn't much work.

I almost have junior status and my major is short, meaning it's plausible for me to graduate in 2026 with two quarters of extra classes, and some people at my school have recommended me to change my grad date to 2026.

Also, I'm not sure if my phrasing for my WIP project, which I might not even finish lol as I'm going to be filling with other experience, is poor or too obviously misleading. Should I just remove the WIP?

Any thoughts? Thanks!

[chilly wren]

work on metrics. majority or all bullet points should have one, not just some of them.especially bullet points like this where you have impact but not the metrics to go with it

for metrics its okay to just estimate, not realistic to know exactly

and most metrics should directly be about business or user value. cost, scalability, # users, etc

i also see you arent putting enough emphasis on cloud/deployment. on my initial read through i thought you had no experience in deployment and cloud and i read it again and i was like oh he has azure and vercel and im sure some recruiters would miss your cloud and deployment skills but not give u the 2nd read like i did

this bullet point doesnt flow well IMO. you completely disregard your experience w/ a database and group it into a bullet point about security

for this, similar to a lot of other bullet points you have the impact (fast page loads and enahcned UX) but no numbers to go with it

and try to find some metrics pecific to gpt-4 api. maybe you did some optimizations to the api calls that reduce cost?

also concerning your WIP, i say keep it. As long as you know how the rest of your project is gonna go, you can just make it up to the interviewer lol. yeah you havent deployed and scaled to 5k users yet but do you know how to deploy and scale to 5k users and can you talk about problems you 'faced'? if u know how to just keep it

[cold cloak]

Got it tysm

Do you think it would be okay for me to remove the (WIP) and just pass it off as a completed project 😅

[chilly wren]

yea get rid of wip

[cold cloak]

Alr thx x100 🙏🙏🙏

[chilly wren]

in the past ive applied with incomplete projects but i knew at least how to implement what i claimed to have implemented

so as long as u can do that then its sometihng u did

in general though more numbers, but make sure they center around business value. not saying they should directly be like 'reduced costs' or whatnot, but at the very least IMPLY business value

but as just a freshman u are doing really good keep it up

keep applying and forget about being resume screened youre competing against juniors with understandably better projects and experience

[cold cloak]

Gotchu bro and one more thing would you recommend changing my grad date to 2026 if I could graduate in 2026 by taking an extra class for 2 quarters but probably wont?

[cold cloak]

Or even more risky just putting my grad date and removing 2024

😳

[chilly wren]

i say no

specifically cuz u sohuld be applying for fresh and soph specific roles

in the end your gradudation date is a future date its just your 'expected' so you can graduate earlier if u want but keep freshie status

[cold cloak]

Gotchu thanks ur the goat

[chilly wren]

np ❤️ u shall make it

[chilly flame]

yea bro bag that google step or metaU

maybe as a sophomore it makes sense to larp as a junior

[cold cloak]

Thx man unfortunately I got ghosted by all the freshman programs I applied to this year next yr tho

[chilly flame]

aw man, you got this!