Landing an Internship

writing a goated resume

I think there’s a million resources on this out there, so ill keep it short:

• Ask Claude (still better at writing than ChatGPT) to roast your resume constructively, it’ll unlock so much improvement
• People often stuff their resume with numbers (correct form), but bad ones (wrong content). Make the stats something people care about.
  • BAD: Optimized my hackathon project backend to 99.99% availability and <1ms latency (P99).
    • This has absolutely 0 impact on the world, and the recruiter can tell no one uses your hackathon project anymore. Probably best to just delete this point (or even the whole project) entirely
  • BETTER: Automated 40hrs/week [or $$ equivalent] of manual validation by implementing evil AI system with XYZ tech stack
    • Good business impact!
• I occassionally get inspiration from resumes.fyi, a crowdsourced collection of resumes and the companies they’ve gotten interviews at. Just take everything with a grain of salt; no verification means that the resumes can either be fake, or they’re lying about the companies

cold applying

• Sadly, for those of us that can’t nepo into somewhere (i would if i could), it’s a numbers game
• The best you can do is keep track of openings (subscribe to listings like Simplify’s (disclaimer: they have sponsored SoDA in the past) or the infamous CSCD server’s) and applying the day they come out.
  • Not to inspire anxiety, but the last point is important to be consistent with. if you apply even a day after, you’ll have been beaten by thousands of applicants
• Referrals are a hit or miss at larger, more established tech companies (think FAANG/MANGO/whatever tier). get them if you can but don’t get your hopes up

surviving online assessments (OAs)

• These are annoying, but companies do it to save wasting their interviewers’ time with people who GPTed through 310.
  • Let us know if you have a positive experience using Cluely, but my hunch is that you will embarass yourself.
• To prep, all you need is cracking the coding interview and Neetcode 150.
  • These take a long time to get through, so you don’t have to do these 100% to pass a technical. And you don’t get cracked by cramming these like a test. This is a long-term process, like going to the gym.
• Use Leetcode Premium to view the specific questions asked by a company you’re interviewing with. Hit up the Hacker Devils discord (see Student Organizations) if you want to be hooked up for free
  • There are also ripped copies of the company leetcode lists out there, though they might be dated
  • If you NEED a last resort, absolutely STAY AWAY from this paywalled Chinese-language forum called 1point3acres that swaps NDA-breaking details on interview questions (behaviorals, technicals), because it’s against the law.

CodeSignal ICF & GCA

This is a standardized test used by many tech companies. These are like the ACT/SAT of OAs. Nice thing is that if you ace one with a 600/600, you can reuse it for other ICF/GCA companies and skip their OA altogether. The part that sucks is that there’s cooldowns: Limit of 3 assessment attempts in a 180 day window, with at most 2 attempts in 30 days [source].

The GCA (general coding assessment) is just leetcode-style questions. Here’s a fantastic deep dive on the GCA about what to expect, as well as some practice questions. And here’s a list of GCA companies (last updated 2023 but still mostly accurate).

The ICF (industry coding framework), unlike the GCA, consists of implementing business logic in an OOP class over 4 increasingly-difficult stages. Ramp and Dropbox are the big ones that use this. Strategy: Don’t care about optimization, target solutions clean enough to be extensible in later stages, and get to stage 4/4 ASAP, because that will take up the most time.

giving behaviorals

• You can use Glassdoor to gauge what kinds of things a company will ask
• In general, hone your STAR story-telling skills, practice with a good partner, and it’ll eventually click forever, like learning how to ride a bike

applying

Below is a list of platforms for internship postings, updated frequently.

Source	Link
ASU Student Employment	https://students.asu.edu/employment/search
Linkedin	https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/
Handshake	https://app.joinhandshake.com/job-search
Simplify.jobs	https://github.com/SimplifyJobs/Summer2026-Internships
Jobright.ai	https://jobright.ai/jobs
ZipRecruiter	https://www.ziprecruiter.com/