Ask HN: Is it harder to get an internship as a grad student in CS than undergrad
2 comments
I think the places that think about masters level and above students generally have research focus. It might be worth looking at government labs or quasi public corporations doing health or other research.
I do not have a masters in CS, but have worked with many. About half went that route for visa reasons. The other half went that route with at least the thought of being in academia or doing some sort of interesting research. Most of the latter did 3-2 programs. Most of the former discovered that the academic life wasn’t for them.
I do not have a masters in CS, but have worked with many. About half went that route for visa reasons. The other half went that route with at least the thought of being in academia or doing some sort of interesting research. Most of the latter did 3-2 programs. Most of the former discovered that the academic life wasn’t for them.
I think it depends on the college and probably to some degree your ethnicity/nationality as well.
I did not seek a masters, but I had friends that did and they all had well paying internships and pretty generous "we'll pay you more if you quit college right now" offers. I also went to a well ranked college. Once you get to the 15th-20th ranked schools recruiter aggressiveness drops off significantly, particularly for the big valley companies. Knowing someone who works somewhere you want to intern is probably the best way, but not everyone has that. If any of the folks in undergrad got an internship somewhere big enough you could ask them if they could recommend you maybe?
As for ethnicity "Asian getting masters at lesser known college" is almost certainly discriminated against.
I think the industry as a whole has bias against masters. Mostly because it's pretty unlikely you would do anything in a masters that would be better than a year of industry experience, not to mention the opportunity cost of paying to go to college instead of getting paid 80-120k+ to work. I think that bias is probably wrong, most of the people with graduate degrees I've worked with were generally better, but I think that's a bias. Someone might do that calculus and ask "did they do a masters program because they didn't get hired?"
Companies also do internships primarily to hire new people. Being in grad school can send the message "I'm more interested in academia than working." So it's not clear to a company they will be able to hire you in a year, which is the goal of their internship program.
If you want direct resume feedback, I will leave it here, but it's going to be pretty direct and also permanently online. You may want to get it reviewed by some critical people in person. Why did you order your experience the way you did is probably the key question. Why not create an events/competitions/awards heading probably gets at the criticism as well? How would you feel if I asked you direct questions about your experience based on your resume? I think if we were in an interview and I started to probe your work experience you would get uncomfortable.
On the friendlier side of feedback, you don't need to qualify your skills. You are either promising proficiency or not, and if you list a skill, that is fair game to be questioned on at an interview. As an interviewer I don't want to have to parse out what "taking a class that uses python" means. You either know it well enough to demonstrate basic knowledge in an interview or you don't. You probably understate your skill set. I imagine you used git, can reasonably navigate a command line, maybe hosted your server software somewhere, you list node.js in a project, but not under skills, it sounds like you can probably write SQL queries, there are probably apple ecosystem skills. The point of a skills section is to hit keywords or get picked up by an automated scanner or to let a non-technical recruiter quickly see that you are a fit for what they are looking for.
I did not seek a masters, but I had friends that did and they all had well paying internships and pretty generous "we'll pay you more if you quit college right now" offers. I also went to a well ranked college. Once you get to the 15th-20th ranked schools recruiter aggressiveness drops off significantly, particularly for the big valley companies. Knowing someone who works somewhere you want to intern is probably the best way, but not everyone has that. If any of the folks in undergrad got an internship somewhere big enough you could ask them if they could recommend you maybe?
As for ethnicity "Asian getting masters at lesser known college" is almost certainly discriminated against.
I think the industry as a whole has bias against masters. Mostly because it's pretty unlikely you would do anything in a masters that would be better than a year of industry experience, not to mention the opportunity cost of paying to go to college instead of getting paid 80-120k+ to work. I think that bias is probably wrong, most of the people with graduate degrees I've worked with were generally better, but I think that's a bias. Someone might do that calculus and ask "did they do a masters program because they didn't get hired?"
Companies also do internships primarily to hire new people. Being in grad school can send the message "I'm more interested in academia than working." So it's not clear to a company they will be able to hire you in a year, which is the goal of their internship program.
If you want direct resume feedback, I will leave it here, but it's going to be pretty direct and also permanently online. You may want to get it reviewed by some critical people in person. Why did you order your experience the way you did is probably the key question. Why not create an events/competitions/awards heading probably gets at the criticism as well? How would you feel if I asked you direct questions about your experience based on your resume? I think if we were in an interview and I started to probe your work experience you would get uncomfortable.
On the friendlier side of feedback, you don't need to qualify your skills. You are either promising proficiency or not, and if you list a skill, that is fair game to be questioned on at an interview. As an interviewer I don't want to have to parse out what "taking a class that uses python" means. You either know it well enough to demonstrate basic knowledge in an interview or you don't. You probably understate your skill set. I imagine you used git, can reasonably navigate a command line, maybe hosted your server software somewhere, you list node.js in a project, but not under skills, it sounds like you can probably write SQL queries, there are probably apple ecosystem skills. The point of a skills section is to hit keywords or get picked up by an automated scanner or to let a non-technical recruiter quickly see that you are a fit for what they are looking for.
I'd also love to hear from people who have their masters in CS and whether they viewed it as a net positive or negative.
Thank you!