On March 6, 2022, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) hosted a talk to dive into the process of procuring IT Summer Internships, open to students in their pre-final year. The first three speakers, Pratham Gupta, Tirth Jain, and Anshal Shukla spoke about getting a Software Development Engineer (SDE) internship in prominent IT companies, while Atharva Chandak and Uday Singla spoke about Research Internships (RIs). 

IT Summer Internship Season

The Placement Unit (PU) invites companies to find summer interns among the pre-final students. These internships often convert to Pre-Placement Offers (PPO) i.e. a job offer in the company where one did their internship. Hence, this is the first avenue for placements available at BITS, other than the placement season and Practice School-II. 

Preparation Process

Pratham began with general preparation tips after explaining the timeline of the process. He laid emphasis on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts such as design patterns and inheritance as well as Database Management System (DBMS) concepts such as writing SQL queries and choosing indexes. Adding to that, he mentioned that it is acceptable to explain an algorithm in case someone is not able to give the exact implementation to the interviewer for Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA).

Putting stress on practice as the most important selection factor, Pratham gave a description of his experience with Summer Internship (SI) preparation. He advised completing easy questions on Hackerrank to have a basic understanding of data structures before the summer and covering at least 80% of the questions on Interviewbit. Recommending LeetCode as the primary platform for practice, he advised against Codeforces or Codechef for SI preparation since their question pattern is quite different from the pattern of company coding round tests. He emphasised the importance of maintaining the ‘momentum’ of solving questions on a daily basis.

Following Pratham was Tirth, offering advice and plans for when one starts preparing for the internship season a bit late. He emphasised not giving more than 45 minutes to a question and checking the solution code put up on the website after that. Solving medium-level questions according to their frequency in interviews is a good strategy, especially when having limited time to prepare. He laid emphasis on making conversation with recruiters as they look for candidates who can communicate well and work with others. 

Anshal talked about the internships for non-CS branches. The criteria for these branches are slightly different as the usual CGPA cutoff is higher than that of CS branches and the number of selections is comparatively less. Having projects on your resume would be a plus point because it allows you to display more of your skills to the interviewer through conversation about the technology involved in the projects. According to him, students should focus on company-specific questions after getting shortlisted by paying more attention to the specific types of questions the given company interviewers have asked in the past. Anshal also added that if students have not done DBMS in their coursework then they should mention it to the interviewer and it is usually not a problem. He ended on the note of exploring off-campus opportunities and not giving up throughout the process in case students are not able to secure an internship early on.

Research Internships

Atharva then took over and addressed the significance of taking up RIs, elaborating on the perspectives that students gain. ‘There are very less number of opportunities we get on campus for research. There are SOPs but they have their own limitations,’ he said. He talked about applying to research programs, cold mailing, and campus opportunities—the most common ways to get an RI. He discouraged using solely Twitter or LinkedIn due to the high competition involved. He advised students to start getting their application prerequisites ready by the end of September. Students are recommended that students remain in touch with their professors and mentors. Additionally, he suggested writing drafts for Letters of Recommendation (LORs) as professors may ask students to make a draft and submit a template. Atharva said that having at least two LORs from BITS professors or PS supervisors would be ideal. One should also keep track of programs such as Mitacs and DAAD offered in August primarily for CS fields. Additionally, shortlisting 3–7 projects early on and requesting the transcript from the AUGSD website well before the deadline would be helpful for one’s application. 

Uday Singla further elaborated about cold mailing, sharing key factors such as structuring the mails prudently, being boastful but authentic, scheduling your mails in the morning hours, and being concise. He advised against adding attachments to mails as they could send the mail to the spam folder. Adding to that, he talked about giving each paragraph of the mail a fundamental purpose and keeping faith in the process.

Questions and Answers

The speakers took a few questions after sharing their personal experiences. A question pertaining to personal projects was answered by Tirth. He said that interviewers only talk about projects if they are familiar with the technology involved, so, he advised not mentioning projects which were very obscure. There was a query regarding the off-campus opportunities available for software internships. Tirth advised keeping a sharp eye on social media platforms like Linkedin and Twitter. He also mentioned that having projects on the resume would be important considering that a very good resume is required for off-campus internships.