CodePath EES2024 GOOGLE - From CodePath to Securing Three Top Internships: AMA

Good afternoon, good evening everybody. Very very excited that you all are here with us today. We have an amazing session from one of our CodePath alums.

This session is g is titled co-path from cop path to securing three top internships. Okay, before we get into the actual presentation, let’s still remember our house rules essentially. Let’s make sure that we want you all to utilize the chat, but let’s make sure that what you all are saying in the chat is relevant to today’s speaker.

Okay? Also, make sure that at the end of this presentation, you make sure that you actually fill out our survey. Will drop that a little later on for you.

Okay, but without further ado, I want to introduce Shbassen. Okay, Sebastian is a software engineering intern at Google, previously at JP Morgan Chase and UKG, studying science at Florida International University. He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the US at 12.

He’s been residing in Miami for the last five years. He’s taken the following cop courses. Android 101, web development 103, TIP 103, iOS 102, and ICP.

So he’s taken quite a few CodePath courses. So everybody, here’s Sebastian, and I will hand it over to him. Thank you, Anthony.

Yeah, I I’ve actually taken quite a few of the CodePath courses, which is kind of one of the the pieces of the secret that you need to have nowadays. But yeah, thank you for the introduction. I’m happy to be here and hopefully I can provide some useful information for all of you.

As somebody pointed in the chat, I do have the internet hat. It’s kind of funky. But I’ll go ahead and take it off.

But yeah, I guess first thing I want to do is kind of talk about my journey into CodePath. Originally I actually, you know, when I came to the US, I moved lived in Ohio for pretty much middle school to high school. And then when I graduated high school, I came down to Florida.

Not out of my own will but actually my mother wanted to move down here so I was okay let’s go ahead and do it happy to be here so you know kind of my first year year and a half I went to Miami date college and you know at that point I didn’t really have anybody in tech who knew what the journey of what is actually required for somebody to actually get a job or like get an internship I didn’t know what internships were but you know what the purpose of them would be so I was late to the game but It’s never too late. That’s kind of one of the things that I realized now is that, you know, you always have to keep going, keep being persistent. And always keep pushing forward.

I guess like one of the things I’ve realized also is like if you’re not getting a rejection a day, from whatever company, like you’re not doing it right at this point. It’s all about looking for applications, looking for opportunities, and just really applying and applying and keep applying to jobs or internships, whatever it may be. But yeah, after I kind of went to Miami date, graduated, then I actually transferred to FIU, which is where I got my introduction to CodePath.

It was through a club here, which is another part of the sauce that you have to kind of chase is making sure that you have a good amount of connections within your school and actively participating in clubs and different activities. Because you know college gives you a good foundation on what you actually have to learn and be able to know to be a computer scientist but you know a lot of jobs are not looking for computer scientists they’re looking for people who can build stuff and solve problems so if you’re looking to build stuff you actually have to go out and build stuff so I was active in in it I actually participated in one of their courses kind of a semesterl long project and that’s where people were talking about CodePath and what they what they kind of have to offer so that’s when I was like, "Oh, this seems really cool." So I went ahead and put my application in for the Android development course, 101. And then, you know, the rest is history after that.

I kind of really enjoyed it, realized kind of the value of having, a good amount of support from outside of your school and even outside of your family. There’s a lot of mentorship, you know, from the courses, but also through the career center. They have really great coaches.

I mean, even leading up to my internships, I’ve been getting a lot of help from various people, which has been really amazing and I’m really thankful. But yeah, I guess, that’s kind of my journey. Let me see.

I guess we can go ahead and start with the questions. I I more or less, you know, it’s been a long day, so I want to make this free flow. I want to answer any questions, you know, you all have about kind of my journey or maybe what you can do to hopefully get an internship or a job.

I’m currently looking for jobs, so we’re all in the same boat. So let’s see. Let me look.

Hey Sebastian, I’m back. Hey, how are you? So, let’s get into a few questions.

Okay. So, the first question I have is what makes a candidate stand out to be selected for an internship? I think there is a good amount of luck involved.

Actually, I feel like a lot of the time, when you’re looking for internships, you know, if you don’t have much experience on your resume, the first thing I would say is go out to CodePath, apply to one of the tracks, whether it be web development or mobile development, cyber security, and kind of see the big picture. It’s not just about like this semester and, you know, getting an internship this year. If you can’t get it this year, maybe you don’t have the right projects or the right preparation.

You know, you can set yourself up to next year actually be able to get an internship. So, when I first took my first course Android, I you know, nothing came of it as far as internship, but I actually learned a lot about what the process is to get an internship. So, I signed up for more courses, the web development track and that’s when I actually began to have meaningful projects in my resume that actually stand out to employers.

Because a lot of the time when you apply to internships, one of the first steps is actually get a resume screen. So, you need to have a good enough resume. It doesn’t have to be, you know, especially if it’s your first internship.

It doesn’t have to be full with all this experience, but it shows that you’re passionate about technology, you’re passionate about building, you can collaborate with people. So, I would say that that’s one of the things that you can do to really stand out is have great projects. And just make sure the resume is formatted correctly.

I’m sure there’s a lot of help online, but that’s another thing. You don’t want to have like a poorly or like sloppy resume. That can really deter readers, even I, you know, if I some people send me resumes and I look at them and sometimes it’s like, okay, you can use a template and literally make this so much better.

So, yeah, I hope that that kind of answers that. For sure. Question, how did you manage doing school work, applying for your internships, and also interview prep?

Like how did you manage all of that under one umbrella? Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it all comes down to kind of time management.

You know, aside from just like that stuff, I was actually working at UPS for a few years. So, that was another factor that actually played into that. But I would say is getting organized, making sure that you have the right courses within your school, and you’re not like bogged down with too many difficult classes.

I would say it’s really important to sit down with your adviser and make sure that you have a a good kind of path for yourself where you can you know have a few like core programming courses alongside some like easy external like general education requirements. So that would be a first thing making sure that your schoolwork is not too overwhelming so that you can do other things right. So like you don’t want school to take up your whole your whole day.

It should only be like log into class, do the homework, maybe review and then after you’re done with that, you know, you do whatever. If you have a job, you go to your job and then kind of at for me what worked was actually at the end of the day, I saw it I used to play a lot of video games u and I kind of trade video games for like interview practice and just applying building projects, right? So it’s kind of at the end of the day have some time to relax and just try to learn something.

You don’t have to learn everything or know how to do everything, but just learn something every day. Maybe if it’s as far as like technical preparation, maybe one legal question a day. It’s it’s a lot actually.

Like it’s a big commitment. But yeah, just slowly but surely kind of making sure that you have your time planned out and look at the long-term map for the semester. It’s not just about like every day, but like in a week, how much time do you need for school?

How much time do you need for interview prep? And for you know other things like being around with your family, going outside. So fair.

This is a really good question. It says, "How much did how much did your time at FIU help you on your journey to Google? If you could go back, would you rather have transferred to a different college?

This particular student is thinking about DC and the beta between FIU and UCF." Yeah. I’ve actually had a really amazing time at FIU. I’m really thankful for all the kind of people that I’ve run into and all the clubs actually, especially in it as a club and CodePath kind of adjacent.

Because I feel like FIU has given me more opportunities that I didn’t have before. Like I didn’t feel supported as much at Miami date. I feel like everybody just went to class and got their stuff done and then went home.

Whereas at FIU, if you go to, you know, in person in the campus, they have the, PG6 building, kind of the computer lab where people are there actively collaborating, doing stuff. And I feel like it’s been a lot easier for me to build a community there. And it’s really great.

As far as like FIU and UCF, I think probably depends up to you and your family. Like if your family is all in Miami, I would probably just choose to stay near my family. Maybe if we have a job or other commitments.

But I’m not really familiar as far as like the curriculums or anything like that specifically between like FIU and UCF. I’m sure they’re probably both great, but it’s not necessarily about like a specific school. It’s about like doing the stuff outside of the class like CodePath or Close.

Because this is what’s actually going to make you stand out. A degree at the end of the day is just a degree. You took the courses and you went through it.

Now with like generative AI and things like that, like it’s very easy to like pass a course for the most part, but it’s very difficult to build a project with a whole group of people for a semester and show that you did X, Y, and Z. So that’s what I would say you have to focus on. Kind of making sure that you’re near your family and what matters to you and making sure that you look out for other opportunities outside of your school.

Awesome response. Now, Sebastian, I have a really good question for you. So, tread lightly.

Okay. This one says, "How much does taking a CodePath course help you in landing an internship opportunity?" That’s I I’m ready for this response. I think the the course that you take, it depends because I guess let me see how how do I phrase it?

Because one thing is that like one thing when you apply to internships or you know jobs is that you have to pass the resume screen. So you have to have projects, you have to have some kind of experience. But then once you get past that then they hit you with the online assessment.

They hit you with the backtoback interviews, right? So that’s kind of the other whole part of this, right? It’s not as easy as just like, oh, okay, he he’s done stuff, she’s done stuff, right?

So I would say you have to take a combination between the tech interview prep courses. I think it’s a really great track. I took the 102 and 103 courses and I had a great time.

I mean the amount of depth and knowledge that the professors had or instructors it was really remarkable. So that’s kind of how you get past the technical preparation aspect of it. And probably I would say 10 101 and 102 for sure.

And then 103 is kind of a good to have. But yeah, and then that’s the technical preparation, but you also need to have a good resume and have experience building stuff. So you need both honestly.

But it’s a really great great opportunity that we all have to be able to take these courses for free and have these opportunities to just meet people. And even you know outside the somebody that I worked with within my tip course Joshua he’s actually interning at Netflix or last summer he did we actually kind of linked up during this school semester and we worked on a project together for one of our iOS classes. So it’s a good way to meet people.

I know that the way they kind of set up the courses sometimes they’ll put you with people from your own school. So that’s also great. But yeah, I don’t think without without CodePath and init and my school, I don’t think I I could have gotten the opportunities that I’ve been at least not as soon as I did.

So it’s really serious. So, for sure would you agree that it’s like you said, it takes a combination. So, yes, CodePath course it it definitely helps, but you also have to have the grit, the determination, you know, the want for for these opportunities and you can’t wait around for them, you know.

So a question that I have, how did you find your internship opportunities? Like were you searching? Did they like fall into your lap?

How did you actually find these three amazing internship opportunities? Right. Right.

They did not fall into my lap. That’s kind of funny. I guess the originally I had this experience.

I had applied for a company and I had an interview with a recruiter and essentially the interview ended like this. We are looking for people that are building stuff that have experience with hackathons and clubs and you know you don’t have it now but that’s what I would recommend you have kind of build up so I I took that advice very seriously and that’s when I kind of started to really focus on building stuff and collaborating with people but yeah I think I think in general just making sure that you stay hungry it’s ever okay to just say say okay I’ve applied to one job today I’m okay like you know you should apply for as many jobs as you can get your hands on and as far as like specifically how I got my opportunities mostly through LinkedIn if you follow the right people there’s a ton of people that like post daily jobs so that’s good and then LinkedIn itself will recommend you jobs when you start like hitting the apply button they’ll send you emails with like oh here are you know 10 new jobs that you might see a good fit. And another one is this GitHub page now.

It’s called well before it was just a GitHub page, but now it’s actually a whole company. It’s called simplify. Essentially, you put your resume information and all your details.

And when you apply to like a company like workday or something like that, it would fill out all of your details. So, you won’t have to sit there and like, you know, put your name, last name, all that stuff. It’ll do it for you.

So, that’s a really good way to like put out all the applications. But yeah, that GitHub page, they have it’s like, let me see, I could probably find it real quick. But yeah, they have internships and full-time jobs, offseason internships.

I’ll put it in the chat. It’s this one. But yeah, they usually it’s pretty updated.

But yeah, that’s mostly what I’ve done. LinkedIn and this this page. Cool.

Being thanks for that. So one question says, "How do you manage feeling of comparison when others have more experience, stronger projects or more polished resumes? Feelings I guess having a polished resume should not be a factor.

They have online you can find this like I I find it too. It’s like Jake’s resume template or something something like that. It’s like very standard.

That’s what I’m using now. But this if you use this template, like your resume will be polished. So that that shouldn’t be, you know, and like with AI and things like that, like resume should be polished regardless.

Like it should have good sentences that kind of describe what you did, how you did it, why it matters, that type of thing. And then so that that’s something that I would say you have to have by default, right? But as far as like worrying about what other people are building, you know, recruiters I think go through so many applications like they don’t have time to like deep dive or they may not even like have the technical knowledge to like understand like the impact or the severity of this particular project that somebody probably spent a bunch of time on.

But it’s all about kind of how you sell what you did. And making sure that it’s understandable to people who were not into tech. So, nobody cares if you use X, Y, and Z frameworks to build a website.

Like, what was the website? What was the point of it? What did it do?

What problem did it solve? Right? So, if you can kind of just pose your projects as like, okay, this is a problem that I had and then these are the solutions, things like that.

I don’t think it really I’ve never worried about like, oh, what if somebody has a better project? Like nowadays, everybody’s building stuff. So, as long as you’re building stuff too, you should be fine.

And I don’t think in general comparing yourself, the only thing I would say comparing yourself that matters is like how many applications you’ve done. Like if somebody did 100 and you did 10, like I think that that’s something fair to compare. Okay.

So, agree. I love that. Yeah.

Let’s see. So, how did you make the most out of your internship experiences? Right.

Right. That’s something that when I I guess most recently I guess I’ll talk about at Google. And actually I I I know you I remember I actually worked with or you know we worked on a hackathon at JP Morgan during one of my internships last year.

So hello. But I would say definitely kind of have a plan to go into the internships and understand that like it’s a limited amount of time right so you have let’s say like 10 weeks it’s an infinite it’s not an infinite amount of time so you have to make sure that you understand that but also your manager whoever is building this project also understands that so that early on you can say okay we have this amount of time I literally went like kind of week by week these are the things that I want to get done by this amount of time so like at some point if something is not done I understand like okay maybe I’m falling behind a little bit how do I get back on track but I would say planning is really important and you know the other piece by making sure that your manager whoever is overseeing you understands that it’s a limited amount of time is because you want to make sure that you can say at the end of the internship I accomplished what I set out to accomplish so if you never set up these goals or these targets that you wanted to hit maybe a set of features for an app or you know have it launch or whatever. If you don’t define those things early on then at the end of the internship if you know you’re looking at a blank slate of like okay I did this this and this but like was this everything that I needed to do it won’t be good.

So, I would say it’s definitely important to really have a plan as far as like what you want to accomplish and make sure that your manager also has a plan for you. And they understand kind of through daily check-ins or weekly whatever how your progress is doing. And you know, besides just like the the work, I think it’s also important to connect with the interns.

That’s something I went to like every every week at Google they they have a kind of an orientation session with all the new interns that are coming in for that week. And then past interns can come. So I would say it’s important to also meet up with different people see how they’re doing because a lot of the time they’re also struggling or maybe have a difficulty doing something and you know it’s good to have a community of support and understand that everybody’s kind of the same boat and it’s okay.

So I hope that helps. It’s great for sure. Let me find this really good one.

What was your interview prep process like? Were you just amazing at it in the beginning or did it take some time for you to get used to the interviewing style, the interview prep? How did that look?

Yeah, I think nobody’s ready for interviewing. That’s something that I really didn’t understand that you know a lot of the time even if you have these great projects or these your resume looks great if you’re not able to kind of solve the the the or get the secret handshake that gets you in the door right then you know you may not get the opportunity but yeah from the beginning you’re not going to know anything. I still don’t know that much.

It’s something you have to build on every week. You you know so no it’s not immediate I think you have to at the beginning it’s good to kind of ramp up a little bit quicker have a good pace for yourself where it’s like every week where like every other day I want to solve x amount of questions or one question at least or whatever but it’s good to kind of put pressure on yourself positive pressure not like negative pressure to push and do what you want to set out to do good to have goals say I want to be able to complete I don’t know 50 every leo questions by the end of you know three months whatever something something like that so that you can track yourself and make so that you’re accountable for the things that you’re doing and then another thing is also that I think helped me a lot is just mock interviews I know that especially if you never done an interview you may not even like know what’s going on but usually these interviews they expect kind of a similar they have a similar format especially for like the technical but the behavioral So that’s where things kind of get a little bit trickier because they’ll ask you like the company and what you know about them and why you want to work for them, what have you done in the past. So all these things I would say it’s important to research and watch people doing mock interviews.

I feel like that helped me. And then once you kind of understand what the process is, do mock interviews maybe with somebody else in your class or if you can get like a mock interview through the career center. I think that’s very valuable.

So yeah, just practice. Do it over and over. Eventually, you get comfortable.

Maybe I’m still not comfortable. So, it it takes time. And I I’ve been I’ve been doing interviews for a long time, and it’s you still get nervous sometimes.

That imposttor syndrome does sneak up on you, even when you know all of the material. So, like you said, just just practice. Another another great question.

At what point did you feel ready to apply for internships? How many did you apply to? Mhm.

I would say the the simple answer to this is like if you’re having any doubts, just go apply today. Like it’s it it doesn’t really matter because even if you’re not ready, if you get the chance to do the interview, it’s great practice. I would say that the best the best practice that I’ve gotten is just to get interviews.

Even if I I don’t necessarily want to work for that company, if they give me the opportunity, I’m going to try my best. And it’s really great practice just to talk to people and interact. So yeah, I think just apply, go apply today.

Apply to as many as you can. All the ones that are open on that GitHub that I sent for sure at least. So yeah, I don’t think you should wait to apply.

Honestly, that that’s fair because you never get enough enough practice, you know, like you could go into I’ve applied for jobs where I knew I wasn’t qualified for. I had interviews. I knew I wasn’t going to get it, but it was great practice.

So, Exactly. Exactly. Love that.

What do you believe made you stand out the best during your application process? I guess let’s say like initially when I had, you know, zero internships, right? What did my resume look like?

My resume looked like I had a part-time job at UPS and you know that was basically all the experience and then a bunch of projects maybe like three or four projects that were kind of big related to different things that I was doing at the time. Maybe at some point a few semesters ago it was like a machine learning project which because that was the thing that caught people’s eyes or maybe like a full stack project building something some kind of app. But yeah, I think at the beginning when you have experience, I think hackathons can really help you.

And just projects in general, but then once you actually have like internship experience, you want to make sure that you highlight it really well in your resume. So, it shouldn’t just be like three bullet points, which I’ve seen this before. People have like, you know, three internships and they have like two bullet points for each internship saying basically nothing and then they have a bunch of like project.

Well, they’re cool projects, but if you have internship experience, that should be like, you know, the majority of a resume, even if it’s only one, you want to make sure that, you know, people know that you’re making meaningful contributions to an actual company. But if you don’t have that, then it’s a matter of having projects and filling it up that way. Or being active in clubs.

But as far as referrals, I’ve never gotten a single referral anywhere to be honest. I’ve cold apply everywhere. I I think depends on the company, but a lot of like bigger companies, it won’t matter that much realistically because they’re so big, they get so many applicants, but for smaller companies locally, I think it probably would help you stand out.

Have another really good one. This one says, "How did you manage without burnout with respect to applying applying for jobs? There could be tons of roles that are yet to being applied for even at the end of the day.

How did you manage the count of job applications per day? I don’t think I count to be honest. I just kind of apply.

They send me the confirmation. Oh, you applied. I’ll hear back from them four months later talking about we’ve unfortunately decided to move on to a different candidate.

And that’s just part of the process. Like I said earlier, it’s like if you’re not getting one rejection a day, I don’t think you’re doing the right thing. So I I know that they have CodePath has a spreadsheet that you can fill in with each application.

I have not done that as thoroughly as I maybe should, but from the beginning I just kind of oh I see a job application on LinkedIn. Okay, I’ll go apply. I see one on the GitHub, go apply.

I mean, if anything comes out of it, they’ll let you know, and that’s when I actually begin tracking. I don’t track until they actually give me like a response, like a positive response. Or if it’s like a a bigger company that you wanted to, you know, kind of target, then I would probably put that down as like, oh, they didn’t.

So, like I I don’t forget. I’m like, did I apply or did I not? But usually I don’t really write anything down until I get like a assessment or something like that.

So that’s when I actually began like actively tracking and like making sure that if it’s like an interview, I have the right preparation. I know all this stuff about the company. But yeah, burnout is probably a real thing.

I mean, I would say I don’t sit down like a particular hour of the day and I’m just like, "Okay, I’m gonna apply to all these jobs." Like it is usually kind of throughout the day. I’m like, "Oh, this interview or this job posted appeared on my LinkedIn. Hey, let’s do it.

Kind of like that. And that can probably help you not just try to block out two hours to apply for jobs every day. So, I think kind of spreading it out throughout the day would probably help you.

Let me ask you this because I think I’ve always had I never understood the the tracking of applications. I’ve never done it. I would just apply and see what happens.

Sometimes I I get call backs from companies that I forgot. I don’t know if it’s the fear of the rejection or the fear of like seeing that you apply for so many jobs and have only heard back from from two after you know three months you know so what what what are your thoughts on that like do you not track out of like a a mental thing or do you just it is what it is you know yeah I think probably mostly it’s because like laziness probably I mean it’s a lot of work to like individually like go in a spreadsheet and like write down like I guess the the way that I would if I had if I’ve done it before I’ve put like the companies that I wanted to apply to on a list and I wanted to kind of make sure that I’ve hit them if their applications are open if not or maybe if I know that they’re going to open on a day I’ll put like a calendar reminder but mostly out of laziness I think and as you said it’s valid to think like okay I don’t want to see like all the applications and like all the rejections Right. So, I only put the positive ones.

It’s like, "Yeah, I’m doing a good job." fair. But, yeah, I I would say just do your thing, apply apply some more and then apply them again. So, fair, fair.

Another student asks, "Top four project suggestions you believe are impactful when recruiters review a resume with little to no industry experience." I mean, I don’t really know to be honest. I mean, when I’m I’ve done resume reviews for people and I’m not a recruiter, so like I’m not specifically targeting anything any particular set of skills or anything, but I think if the job description is there and it says we’re looking for a machine learning engineer that knows how to work with OpenCV and other whatever PyTorch, other machine learning things. And if you have a project that does that same thing and you have, you know, maybe let’s say I’m going to put it like this.

Let’s say you have slot for like three projects on your resume. And it probably would be beneficial for you to swap out maybe that machine learning project for your full stack, I don’t know, YouTube clone, whatever. Because that’s what the recruiter is going to be looking for.

They’re going to be looking for somebody with like machine learning experience. So I think it depends on the job description. In general, I think full stack projects is the way to go.

Nothing too specific. So anything that has like some kind of back end, some kind of front end, and it solves the problem, I think it’s valuable. So yeah, I’m not not really sure about top four projects.

I mean, usually I’ve seen a lot of like clones of something that you like to use. So I I mentioned YouTube. I don’t know.

I I’ve done projects more like catered towards like inventory management, but that was because my aunt, she has her business and she needed some kind of solution for that. So, I was like, "Oh, this seems like a cool problem to tackle." and yeah, in general, try to look for inspiration, maybe a family member that has an idea or something that they would like to see. I don’t think it matters that much specific like project.

Awesome. That works. Another question is specific to your experience with UKG.

I recently applied for UKG, what is the hiring process and how was your overall experience? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. UKG I had a I actually had a really great time at UK. I had a really great team with great people and also besides just the people was actually kind of the tech that we were working with because the you know UK you have kind of the standard Java C back end which is the majority of like the customerf facing stuff but like in the back end internal tooling and things like that they actually use like completely different tech and it’s like fairly open source and cool things that you can actually learn on your own.

But yeah in general the the interview process you could use fairly straightforward. I think they lean really heavily into the resume screen. So, essentially, I think it goes like this.

You have a resume screening by a recruiter. They’ll check you out. They’re like, "Okay, it looks good." Then you’ll go ahead and move into some kind of interview with the recruiter directly to verify that their signals are right and you’re a good fit.

Then after that, they may send you some kind of online assessment to kind of gauge your skills that you know in general. And then after that then you will go straight into a final round of interviews. I believe it’s two to three interviews.

They’ll have for sure like a techn two technical interviews which would be like separate like different people probably like some kind of easy to medium leico question. I think one of them I had two questions in one but the questions were not like insanely difficult. So having a good foundation is definitely good.

And then the second interview was actually kind of a object-oriented programming question. It was less about specifically like data structure and algorithms but more about like knowing what an interface is and reading a bunch of code and like fixing bugs and like making it work with like op concepts, object-oriented programming concepts. So I think that that’s more or less the idea.

I think they have maybe depending on the role they would have a like a job fit type of thing. So if it’s like a specialized like role for like AI, things like that, they’ll probably have an interview with somebody who knows about that to kind of verify that you know what you’re talking about. So I hope that helps.

There. We’re gonna probably take maybe two to three more questions before we wrap it up. A student says they are graduating in December and didn’t get to intern but was but would still love to before graduation.

Is that possible and or is it a good or bad idea in your opinion? I would say it’s definitely if possible, I would say let’s say like a company you applied. I I know some companies are still recruiting for like fall internships.

Let’s say you know you applied to a company, they hit you back and you they give you an offer, which may not happen that quick. But if you had an offer for an internship in the fall this year, I would definitely say take the internship and just graduate next year. Because aides from just like getting the experience, a lot of the time the companies will actually just convert you to full-time at the end of the internship.

So, it would be a lot easier to do that than you know try to break in through a bunch of interviews or resumes trying to compete with people with like internships or that work there previously through an internship. But yeah, I would say now it’s very beneficial to have an internship or maybe I guess in your school, depending on the school, they’ll probably maybe look into like a research opportunity. That’s something that I’ve also seen really cool projects.

So yeah, I would say if possible try to do it. If not, then it’s going to be a little bit more difficult probably. Fair.

Awesome. One student said, "What was the most surprising thing that you learned working at Google?" I would say going into Google, I expected, you know, that people were just going to be like absolute geniuses and know everything about everything in the world. And that’s not the case.

I think that the most surprising thing is just like the openness of knowledge that you can gain. There is kind of the equivalent of Google and like Google search but like for internal questions and document documentation. So I think it’s important to really understand that as an engineer you have to just be willing to look up something or find out how to do it if you don’t know.

And that’s okay. It’s not like they’re expecting you to know everything. So that that’s something that really kind of surprised me how much information they had readily available.

So you could just like look up how to do something and they will have like great documentation by other engineers telling you how to do it. So yeah, that that’s probably cool. And the last question is how important is it to apply early?

If so, what is considered early? One day, one week etc. I mean, unless you know specifically like let’s say a week ago I had somebody from my school, she works at Google and kind of does a camp campus outreach. She sent me and you know probably a whole lot of other people from my school an email telling us oh Google step internship and full-time or step and sweet internships would open within a week on this day right so if you know what’s going to happen on this day I would say mark your calendar and apply at 11:59 for that like regardless of the company so you want to be as early as you can but if you don’t know when it opened like I would say just apply as you see it maybe save it for later, copy the link and apply later.

But I wouldn’t say like wait, oh, let me wait until I finish this project. That’s another thing even, you don’t have to finish a project to, put it on your resume. Like, if you’re working on something, talk about like what is the overall like what you’re going to do and what will you’ll be working on as you kind of do it.

And put it on there. But yeah, I don’t think you should wait to apply. So awesome.

With Sebastian. We really appreciate you for joining us this evening. Everybody give Sebastian a round of applause.

Show your appreciation for him in the chat. We really really do appreciate you for coming in this drop dropping jewels about your experience at three major tech companies. We really appreciate it.

And students, please if you scroll all the way up to the top, you will see a pinned resume book that’s also in the chat. You’re also going to see the survey that’s in the chat as well. So, if you can fill that out, that will be amazing.

Until tomorrow. We appreciate you all for joining us to today. Have a great night and we’re going to play Bobby’s final video.

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