Secured a full time job offer!

Got a job lined up after I graduate at a really large bank firm as a software engineer!! Hoping to provide some positivity in this subreddit full of doom and gloom. A little bit about me, first gen co

Got a job lined up after I graduate at a really large bank firm as a software engineer!! Hoping to provide some positivity in this subreddit full of doom and gloom. A little bit about me, first gen college student with no family in tech or engineering. I went to a regular high school, 3.5 gpa and went to my local CSU in the fall of 2022. Originally majored in electrical engineering but switched to computer science a couple months before I started. I had never written a single line of code until my cs 101 course in the spring of 2023 where I struggled a lot. I would always ask my friend who was a year above me for help. I just remember being so bad at coding. I knew I had to get internships and experience in college, so I started applying to everywhere I could my sophomore year in fall of 2023. Didn’t land a single interview which was disappointing. Luckily a mid sized company took a chance on me, even with the awful resume I was using to apply to internships, and I landed an position as a engineering intern in summer of 2024 where I just executed test cases on the devices our company was developing. Wasn’t directly software related but it got my foot in the door and it was experience I could put on my resume. That summer I locked in. At this point, I only knew C++ had never tried to learn anything outside of my college coursework. Started learning Python, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript and created some basic projects. Also started doing leetcode. First leetcode I did by completely by myself was done in August with O(N^2) time complexity😭. After putting my new skills and experiences on my resume I began recruiting for summer 2025. I did maybe 300-400 apps, and I got 3 interviews all for SWE, which were Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Walmart which were all done around September/October 2024. Did well on the first Microsoft interview, completely failed my second interview (got asked system design which I had not studied for). Passed the first round Walmart interview , didn’t pass the final round. Got the offer for Qualcomm in October so I stopped recruiting. Did my summer 2025 internship, updated my resume and began recruiting again in August in case I didn’t get an RO because of headcount (still haven’t received a RO) I’d estimate I did around 300-400 apps again. Got a couple OAs, failed almost all of them except 1, which led to a final round interview. Did the behavioral which went really well, did the technical, where I didn’t do too well at first, but luckily my coding made up for it (got asked two sum and two sum ii and some other array questions). Got the call from the recruiter letting me know I got the job and got the offer letter the next day. Accepted the offer about a week and a half after. Also did an interview for an internship, still haven’t got feedback for that. I’ll be moving to the Bay Area and starting my new job in February since I’m graduating a semester early. All my experience was done through cold applying, no referrals or anything. It’s still crazy to me how I was able to land a swe internship 2 or 3 months after starting leetcode, and a swe job about 2 years after I wrote my first “hello world” program in c++. My advice for people would be to try to get experience as soon as you can. Even as a freshman, apply to internships, create meaningful projects, go to hackathons. Companies aren’t going to hire people with no experience. Also you have to dedicate the time to learning things outside of your coursework if you’re not doing so already. I’d also say getting that first experience is definitely the hardest. It’s a lot easier to get interviews once you have some experience even if it’s unrelated on your resume, though I have seen people with google on their resume saying they’re not getting interviews and unfortunately a part of it comes down to luck. Especially getting that first round interview. But once you do get that interview you have to take 110% advantage of it and leave nothing in the tank for that. Obviously knowing people in tech helps a ton, but I was able to do it without any connections so it is still definitely possible. It’s a grind, but I promise it will be worth it, all it takes is one company to say yes! I wish everyone the best!