“We decided to move forward with another candidate”
--
March 5th, 2023
“While we enjoyed speaking with you and learning more about your skills and experience, we decided to move forward with another candidate whose experience closely matches the position requirements.”
Yesterday, my attempt at getting a U.S. internship was concluded with the above quote. I’ll leave my list of applications here, mainly for myself to look back at. 129 companies, most of which simply did not reply, a bunch of no:s, and a few coding challenges, with Palantir & Tesla giving me a “real shot”, the latter of which sent me the rejection email last night.
As I sit here, waiting for the Swedish stock market to open, I reflect on Steve’s words: “You cannot connect the dots looking forward.” The entire reason I worked so hard getting into the exchange program with the University of California was to establish some kind of “roots” here in the states (where the internship would have played a key role), so as to allow me to work with all the amazing companies who’ve decided to headquarter here.
By not landing an internship, I’ll simply have to go home (J1 visa, section 212(e), etc., etc.). And I think that’s fine. It might just be life nudging me towards not walking down the well-worn path, and instead spending my time before graduation building my companies. But what do I know, we can only connect the dots looking backwards, right?
However, what I bring with me from this is:
(1) it takes a LOT of work to land an internship in the tech industry
(2) there’s a job to be done improving the recruiting process in said industry
Regarding (2), I spent November/December last year interview-prepping (i.e., leetcoding). This time could have been spent learning other technologies, say PostgreSQL, that would’ve instantly been a value-add to my clients (this of course comes after a client in January specifically asked me to build a back-end using SQL). I will make sure that all tech recruiting in JKM will reflect the work position being filled! Exampli gratia, build an API endpoint for serving prices for all CSGO items — with the caveat that all tools are allowed (yes, including stack overflow, google, API docs, ChatGPT, or however else you would go about solving the problem, those technologies are simply a reflection of how I would do it)
The market is open, meaning I have to go execute a buy order (don’t despair, it’s not anything to run home about). I simply found a Swedish investment company, with no debt, holding a marketable portfolio worth in excess of its market value. Should probably be a solid addition to the portfolio.
Thanks for reading, I promise the next one will be a tech tutorial. Probably on setting up PostgreSQL on a Ubuntu server. Did I mention that I write these articles for myself to refer back to?
//Kevin
