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So You Want a Software Engineering Internship

Is it possible?

"The market is cooked", "Everyone's been coding since they were twelve", and many other variations are just some of the phrases you might hear among your peers. While the number of software engineering jobs may be trending downwards, there are still plenty of internships and roles out there. You just have to prepare your time effectively to put yourself in the best position to get one. How? Well, that's what this guide is for – to hopefully help point you in the right direction.

Alright, so how do I get one?

Resumes

One of, if not the, key things that recruiters use to filter candidates is your resume. The parseability and readability of your resume is extremely important. It might look nice to create a document with fancy colors and cool pictures, but this is not what recruiters are looking for. They're looking for information about you – informative but quickly scannable.

Bad resume!

Bad Design! ❌

Good resume!

Good Design! ✅

Notice how the second resume is much more readable and scannable than the first one. The first one has a lot of colors and images alongside some truly gruesome graphic design and contrast, while the second one is simple and easy to read, with clear sections and a consistent format.1 This is what you should aim for in your resume. A great template to start with if you don't feel as confident making your own is Jake's Template (should be one of the first results on Google, to an Overleaf document). This requires learning/using LaTeX, which is a markup language that is used to create documents. You can make beautifully typeset documents with it, but not required if you don't want to learn it.

On that note, I actually got my first internship offer with a Microsoft Word resume, the template for which I got from the University of Washington's Allen School. As long as it's clear, concise, and easy to read for recruiters, they will not care what you use to make it. Just please submit a PDF.

It's important to note that you should attempt to treat your resume as a living document. This means taking a look at what roles need – if they want special skills, make sure to mention them. If you have more relevant experiences for a particular role, include those for your resume. Get people to review your resume – we have a channel dedicated specifically to this in our Discord server. It's important to know how other real people see your resume and double-check it.

Lastly, if you want a more in-depth and thorough guide on what to put on your resume, check out this reddit post. It has a lot of great information on how to format your resume, what to put on it, and how to make it stand out. We'll also have a tool coming soon to help ;)

Applications

There are many tools out there to help you with your applications. While you might be tempted to spam LinkedIn or Indeed, there are actually other places targeted specifically towards SWE/CS internships that you can use. Some of the ones I personally use are Github repos that are updated automatically, like this one and this one. Note that these are for 2025, but the one you'll want to look at will depend on your recruiting season. In terms of what companies, positions, etc., there are these wonderful slides from our officers that give a great overview of the recruiting landscape. Note that these are suggestions for an absolutely biased perspective towards big tech and names for internships. You may want to do research, make projects, hang out with friends, take some classes, or variably many other things in your first few years. THIS IS OK! It is important to keep in mind that these "targets" or "companies" are goals for a specific path, and if you want to pursue that, great! However, these are definitely not the only companies you should be applying for; in fact, you should be applying to many, if not just to get the option to choose from. Note that a lot of these companies require junior standing of some kind – if you are "able to" graduate in that year, feel free to go ahead and slap that as your graduation date, even if you don't end up graduating that year.

Interviews

Check out the interview prep section for more information on how to prepare for interviews. There are many resources out there, and we have a lot of them listed in the wiki. Some of the most popular ones are LeetCode, NeetCode, and HackerRank. These are all great resources to practice coding problems and get used to the interview process.

  1. Most resumes nowadays are black and white for a reason. You might think this is for "beating the ATS", but it's just as important, if not more, to "beat the reviewer"! ↩