if I was in college and I wanted to land my first big tech software engineering internship for the summer of 2025 here is everything that I would start on right now if you're new here hi my name is sad I'm a computer science Master's graduate from Georgia Tech I landed my first big tech software engineering job at the age of 20 earning $220,000 every single year I've worked at Big tech companies such as Amazon and now every single day I help hundreds of thousands of students land their role in big Tech and in this video I'm going to be giving you a comprehensive 8we guide to land your first internship and I'm so glad you're watching this video right now because companies just open up their slots for next summer and once those slots are filled they will not open them again so let's get started right away so in your 8we guide first we have week one and two and you're going to work on projects at this point you're not really a pro nor do you have any experiences under your belt but projects are your experiences before you get formal work experience but then begs a question hey what projects do you actually do well if you're a complete beginner that doesn't know how to code start simple maybe like a calculator in Java or to-do list in Python those simple projects but once you get a little more advanced try these two projects one a full stack web application take a Pomodoro for example it's a timer that helps with project management for this you're going to need a clean front end that can display timers sessions and projects to the user but in the back end you're going to need to create an elaborate structure that can store timers within sessions and sessions within projects I recommend using reactjs for the front ENT and python or Java for the back end two you have a machine learning project pick a data set on kaggle.com for example I did a project one time predicting covid-19 debts so you take this data clean it process it using pandis or numpy which are python libraries then learn the sklearn library and use the fit and predict functions to train and test your models bonus points if you can create visualizations using matplot lib and get performance metrics so after these two weeks you have experiences and skills under your belt now it's time for week three your resume the biggest mistake that I see a lot of people make on their rumes is terrible terrible formatting I mean y'all check yourselves out in the mirror 50 times before you step a foot out the door but you can't have a half decent resume I don't get how this works but lucky for you I have a free resumé template Link in description so you can get amazing amazing formatting now in terms of what to actually put onto your resume here are some quick fire five tips one remove the start date of your education and only put the expected graduation date companies hate hiring freshmen and sophomores so by taking off the start date you remove them from the idea of that in their minds and trust me that's what landed may my first big tech software engineering internship at Amazon as a freshman in college two include your citizenship status if you are a citizen of course it'll FastTrack recruitment for you because recruiters ideally want to hire citizens it's just cheaper how the companies work their psychology not mine three no High School experience on your resume whatsoever unless it is super super technical for example once I got to college I removed Debate Club model1 Deca from my resume but I kept a machine learning project I did in high school four experiences and projects are way way way more valuable than volunteering and extracurriculars these companies do not care how altruistic you are even if you read books to kids at a library for 4 years do not put that on your rese because they only care about what technical value you bring to the company five include numbers they Drive eyeballs to your resume so after you have a perfect resume do not apply for a job yet week four is probably the most crucial and that is networking oh but I have no idea how to network none of my friends work in big Tech well do you have a LinkedIn yes you do okay perfect when I was applying for internships back in the day I used to go onto LinkedIn search up software engineering at compy X now a problem a lot of people do is like just connect with people and think that's networking but that's not really what it is I personally would connect with 30 to 50 people from said company like software engineer at Google I would connect with them and then I would actually shoot them a message I would say hey my name is sad I'm a computer science major here at Georgia Tech I have this experience and I have this interest would you be down to hop on a 15-minute call to talk about your experiences at this company through this you turn a cold Outreach to a warm Outreach and then once you hop on a call you establish your report and be like hey would you be down to give me a referral to this company for this upcoming internship program do not do not do not apply without a referral trust me you will be shooting yourself in the foot especially in this market you need every single Advantage you can get once you get the referrals now we can head into week five and you can start applying here are a few resources you can use and not sponsored by the way one notify doc careers every single day they send you open job postings that are tailor to your location and desired salary two levels. fy/ internships you can see exact compensation packages and bonuses and apply to open positions now you can actually Flex on your friends if you make more money three LinkedIn itself it's a great resource because you can straight up apply to so many jobs with your LinkedIn profile within the matter of seconds four Google and search up Google GitHub summer 2025 internship you'll see many repositories that have open positions just listed out there and they typically update them pretty well throughout the school year once you apply to referrals to you typically will be hearing back with an initial behavioral screening so for week six we got behavioral interview prep and for this thing I got three things to say one have a good personality learn from me two know everything on your resume typically when you come into an interview they will ask you different questions like tell me about a time when you dealt with a conflict tell me about a time in which you had to meet a tight deadline the ideal situation would be you answer these questions from experiences that are on your resume so for each experience you should have a surrounding story on your resume don't just say hey I worked at Google say while I was at Google working on the new API call for the maps team we dealt with a conflict in implementations and we deliberated upon design choices and we went with the most cost-efficient option deriving your answers to the questions from your resume gives you that complete holistic look three know your leadership principles I stole this from Amazon every single employee hired into Amazon must adhere to 14 different leadership principles it's their company values but something that I realized that is so cool about them is that they make for great responses to behavioral interview questions for example what's your biggest strength well my biggest strength is I am very customer obsessed and oriented any project I'm implementing and solving I put the customer's interests and mindset first and this is apparent through design choices usability and product delivery what is your biggest weakness well my biggest weakness is that some times I dive too deep into certain problems I get lost in my work from time to time and I fail to see the bigger picture you see how these are just so much nicer sounding than just the generic ones and if you want a behavioral interview question bank that has Target skills for what they're looking for check out Link in description absolutely for free once again once you passed the initial behavioral HR screens now it is time for a technical interview prep in week s technical interviews usually come in three forms one always online online assessments two online video interviews three whiteboard interviews overall what all these interviews Target is data structures and algorithms and leite code let me know if you guys like a full length video on this and I'll probably make one but in short it's important to learn every single data structure in algorithm first and for that I recommend CSV tool.com and then after learning that that's when you actually put it into practice and for that I recommend obviously going on to Elite code starting off with easy questions the important thing is is to practice based on different structure types not just like the difficulty meaning do a bunch of different array questions until you master it then a bunch of different Stacks a bunch of different cues and then as you're mastering each data structure and algorithm you move on to the next one so you have your fundamentals extremely tight oh but what happens if you get stuck when you're doing a practice problem well that's where I have your next source and that is Geeks for geeks this is a site that for leak code questions they provide solutions that are root Force optimized and optimal and many different coding languages so it's perfect regardless of your background they also have other articles and visual diagrams so you can learn more technical stuff okay so at this point you have successfully passed your technical interviews landed that offer and for the final week week number eight let's talk about offer negotiations and post offer activities rule number one for your internships do not ever negotiate your salary unless you have a competing offer and it's something significant it's really hard especially in this market to come buy offers and if you try to negotiate there's always a chance where they pull the plug on you and trust me an extra $5 an hour will probably not change your life but if companies pull your offer away that'll probably significantly hurt your life but in terms of other things that you should do once you actually get your offer well first of all chill relax and celebrate because you worked really hard but then one or two months before your internship start date reach out to your recruiter and ask if you could be put in touch with your manager try to set up a one-on-one with your manager this way you can at least start mentally preparing for your work this summer or maybe if you're going to work on a technology that you have no clue about you can actually start maybe doing a corser course on it it just gets you so prepared so reach out one or two months in advance well that's about all I have for this video I really hope that you guys liked it and if you did make sure to hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already and if you want a complete indepth guide of what software Engineers actually do on a day-to-day basis you might like this video right here