I interned at Google’s San Francisco Office during Summer 2015. Here are the things that got me an internship at Google’s San Francisco office:
– Good Grades – Yes I was able to get attention because of good grades. It made my resume worth looking at!
– Awareness – Many good programmers that I know don’t even know about the career opportunities available. They take whatever they get. They do not try to get better offers. So awareness helped me a lot. I interviewed with multiple organisations which prepared me for more important interviews.
-Contact with Seniors – Having good relations with all the great programmers in my senior batch helped me a lot. They constantly guided me to improve my skills. Some people also get employee referrals due to their connection with alumni working at Google. Mock interviews with seniors helped me a lot. Also after listening to their stories, I made sure I don’t repeat the mistakes they made. There is something to learn from those who fail too!
– Constant hard work – Yes. Hard work and a quick learning attitude along with positivity and confidence helped me during interviews. Confidence during interviews can create a good vibe between you and the interviewer. It creates that necessary first impression. After all, it’s all about those 45 to 60 mins. I prepared hard for my interviews. Read up a lot of sample questions.
– Competitive Programming – I think my experience with competitive programming helped me in understanding data structures and algorithms. I am not a very good at competitive programming. I only did it for few months. But during those months there was a steep learning curve. I really gained confidence in my own coding abilities. After competitive programming I could easily reduce problems into simpler ones and implement it.
– Open Source Contributions – Working with large code bases and working in collaboration with other programmers will improve your software engineering skills. Most of the time you won’t be building things from scratch and thus you must know how to understand code written by other programmers and edit it. You should know how to re use codes as much as possible. And open source contributions really improved my coding style overall. I learnt to write readable codes with no memory leaks or missing corner case.
(The article originally appeared on Quora)
