Internship Search Update
22 Feb
Update: I accepted a Web Applications Engineering co-op with Fisher Controls in Marshalltown from May through December.
The career fair was two weeks ago and I’m still waiting to find out where I’ll be this summer. This post outlines my approach to my search and how stuff went.
Here’s the resume I took to the career fair: Adam Reineke’s Spring 2011 resume [PDF]. I tried to create a hybrid resume that contained elements of a traditional resume enhanced with a writing style that would be more commonly found in a cover letter. My goal was to take the three areas that recruiter are most concerned with — education, experience, and extra-curricular involvement — and highlight those. I’ve heard these three described as a three-legged stool. You need all three, and if one is lacking, it can hurt your opportunities.
My cumulative GPA is 2.58, which is low enough that it blocks me from getting pre-selected for most interviews and even keeps some companies from taking my resume (namely a large medical company). The magic GPA number is 3.0. Below that, you struggle. Above that, you’re fairly set. The career fair offers a great opportunity to talk to recruiters who have to talk to you before throwing you out. I took advantage of this by highlighting my core GPA, a 3.18, which shows that I am competent in my focus area. Some companies, especially those with hard cutoffs, are familiar with this tactic and ask for the cumulative instantly, ending the conversation quite quickly. Other companies didn’t even ask.
So how’d it go?
Before the career fair, I applied for four interviews and was approved for two. I had also posted my resume on Twitter and landed an interview from that. At the career fair, I talked to around fifteen companies. (I had printed 30 resumes and I currently have 11 left after giving some out at interviews and giving one or two to friends). One scheduled an interview right on the spot, everyone else got back to me later. Over the next week, updates started coming in. I interviewed with, in alphabetical order:
- AEGON (in person)
- Blue Compass (on-site)
- Emerson/Fisher (in person, phone)
- Garmin (phone)
- Microsoft (in person)
- Pearson (in person)
- Rockwell Collins (in person)
- Thinix (in person, phone)
Responses, in no particular order (but not alphabetical):
- No, you’re overqualified and would be bored, but when you graduate, please apply for a full-time position.
- No, my GPA is too low, but I’m a strong candidate and was told to stay in touch with the recruiter so when my GPA improves I can schedule an interview.
- Currently scheduling an on-site interview.
- Waiting to hear back.
- Waiting to hear back.
- Waiting to hear back.
- Waiting to hear back.
- Waiting to schedule.
Of all those interviews, I only had two that asked any technical questions. One asked if I used tables or CSS to lay out web pages, so I pulled up some pages I had worked on and showed off my code. I think that stopped them from asking more questions. The other asked the process I would go through to develop a website, mostly discussing the gathering requirements and design phase. All the other interviews were behavioral questions and questions about work I had done previously.
I’ll think on the behavioral questions I was asked and let you know some of those in a future post. One of them was really tough. I gave a joke answer for another and made one my interviewers laugh pretty hard. Check back soon!
