How I landed my first internship at a San Francisco startup
As a college sophomore who had recently declared a computer science major, I knew that I wanted to find a summer internship, but had no clue where to start. In the past, I’d held jobs over the summer and developed some skills with web development and SEO, but I had only taken a few CS courses and didn’t know if I had the technical skills to land a software engineering internship. For the first couple of months, I did what many people do. I applied to as many internships as I could find. I waited around, got denied by some places, and got ghosted by others.

I knew that I didn’t have much experience, so what could I expect? When applying to these internships, I felt like I was putting my application into a black hole and was unsure as to if anyone even saw my resume.

What I decided to do next may come as a surprise: I looked for internships on Craigslist. I wanted to find a way to get my application seen by someone and knew that applying to job postings on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and Indeed wasn’t working for me. I wanted to put myself into a smaller pool of applicants where I wouldn’t be competing with hundreds of others for a role.

While applying for internships on Craigslist, I would always follow the instructions in the job listing to a tee. This was important. Often, we are drawn to taking the easy way out, but showing that you’ve put effort into your application goes a long way.

I soon found a listing for a business development internship at a conversational AI startup called Augment CXM. In this role, I would be able to leverage my web development and SEO skills while learning more about business. I made it clear early in the interview process that I was also interested in data science and was ultimately able to work on some really cool data science projects as well.

Below are some key insights that I gained during my first internship search that I’d like to leave you with:
['David Peletz']
['Technology', 'Software Development', 'Startup', 'Job Search', 'Internships']