Hey Anteaters, I hope your first quarter went amazingly well. As some of you may already know, it is internship hunting season!!! (well, to be fair, this is mostly true for those of you who are in Computer Science and Engineering oriented degrees). Therefore, I thought it will be nice if I could share some of my own experiences with you, so you can have better chances of getting that precious position and spread how amazing UCI students are! 🙂
When looking for a job, there are couple of crucial things that you should do in order to start the process. The most important one is to START EARLY!!! Summer internship positions for PhD and MS students are being filled right now and the bigger the company is (Google, Facebook, etc.) the quicker this process will end. Smaller companies, on the other hand, will still have offering in late February and March, so don’t wait and start applying now! Secondly, try to apply through someone you know that already works there. Most companies have incentives for their workers to bring their friends and as a result the HR department are a long list of people to call to before they’ll call anyone who applied through the online application or any other equivalent. If you don’t know someone, ask your Professors (if you’re a PhD student), they probably know a lot of people 🙂 If you’re a MS students — the career fair and other recruiting events is your main go to.
Once you started the process, here are my top 3 tips that could improve your chances of getting your dream job:
Tip 1: Keep track of the companies you contacted and who you talked to in each one. I recommend keeping it all in a spreadsheet. It looks really bad when someone in the company asked you who you talked to already and you have no idea.
Tip 2: Know the products of the company you are interviewing with. A common question in any interview will be ‘what do you want to do in our company?’. Needless to say, if you don’t know any product, you can’t really answer that.
Tip 3: Do mock interviews. Practice showing your thought process and how to openly address your difficulties. The more you talk – the better you interview will go 🙂
For more tips and suggestions, feel free to contact me at mlichman@uci.edu. Hope that helped.