Internships after graduation

After hearing that it is quite difficult to get a job as an entry developer, has anyone done internships after they graduated? I dropped out of college when I was younger and started going back about 2 years ago. (I am 27 now). I will graduate with a B.A. in Computer Science in April and I am wondering if I should be applying for internships or apply to entry/junior positions when I graduate. Because of real life circumstances, I never applied for internships when I should have. I am trying to see what I can do to get actual experience. Anyone have experience in this matter? Thanks.

If you’re graduating in April of 2020, then now is a good time to be applying for jobs. You may get offers for full-time work, internship work, or both. When I was in the fall semester of my final year, the offer I ended up accepting was an internship that would start immediately followed by a full-time offer that would go into effect upon successful program completion.

Good to know. I am currently working on polishing up my resume and strengthening my portfolio.

It is just discouraging since nearly all the job posts I am looking at want years of experience.

Go ahead and start applying with what you have, while you keep working on your resume. Work with your university to be connected with employers who are specifically hiring recent graduates.

I would leverage what time you have left in school to seek out any opportunities your school provides for the job search. Most schools provide stuff like job fairs, career fairs, career centers, and internship opportunities.

I’d check to see if your school provides anything, and apply as soon as possible. The good thing about graduating soon is people looking for “fresh meat” usually look at local schools for freshly graduated talent, as it usually means cheap, bright eyed people ready to work. Don’t mind the requirements of jobs, or internships if they are “entry level”. It could be said you already have 2 years of programming if you had courses that had you programming from the start.

Once you have a degree you instantly get a head above those without one during applying to jobs. Obviously you might be competing with someone with actually more experience, but no matter what graduating does give you some automatic verification that you know something, and you worked hard to do something.

Continue working on your skills for jobs you want to apply to, keep applying, keep learning, and keep getting better. It isn’t like when you graduate you know 100% of what you need to know (its unfortunate, but that is the nature of the tech) so you will still need to expand your horizons.

Good luck :slight_smile:

Thanks. Yea my biggest fear is that I don’t know enough. Of course I have worked on my own projects with different front-end frameworks, but I feel like working in a professional environment is much different. I am also curious about what positions to apply for. My biggest area of expertise is of course Full-Stack development, but should I be applying for software development positions as well? For example like a Java developer. In other words, even though my portfolio is made up of web projects, should I still try to apply for other kinds of positions. It’s not like I don’t have experience with other languages and software development, I’m just not sure if it is enough. I am not sure if this is the right mindset, but should I take any position (of course with reasonable salary) just to get my foot in the door and gain professional experience?

I’d apply to what you want. Unless your in dire need of a job, and have financial obligations, then going with what you want is probably the best bet. If you want to go into Java, and know enough about it know know you wont super hate Java (just an example) then apply.

Odds are you will get rejected for applying to some jobs, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Rather you should do it and find out why your rejected, this is the single best way to get feedback and awareness of where you stand.

I think what your feeling is a mix of imposture syndrome (I don’t know anything!) mainly due to the lack of knowledge of how professional developers are, and the feeling that professional development is super different than working on your own projects. Yes there are differences, but if you have built something in the past, you probably know a decent amount of the process. There probably is more things to learn that you didn’t think about, but whats the difference between learning that stuff and the stuff you already learned?

I believe the right mindset is one where you have enough confidence in being able to learn what you need to get the job done, and enough awareness to know when you need to learn something new. This gives you the flexibility to be agile in your career, and know where you need to improve yourself. Don’t believe you need to be at a point where you know 100% of what you need, nor should you think you need to be anywhere near that.

Finally, I recommend being a “jack of all trades” if you don’t have a personal preference in your job search. It sounds like you have a good mix of skills, so you can apply to a mix of jobs and stay flexible in your job search.

Don’t worry about not knowing enough, you always will need to learn more. Just be confident in knowing what you know, and flexible to learn what you need :slight_smile:

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