2/8/2026: Recapping my SWE internship hunt for summer 2026 experiences: the writeup.
The TL;DR is that I was stupid, I was not good at interviewing for software, my resume from Summer 2025 looks absolutely nothing like how my resume is right now, which really is just half a year later. Oh and I did end up getting an offer from my GOAT LINKEDIN!!!, thank god
My first experience with software internship recruiting was during my sophomore year. I was not very good at taking ownership of the software I wrote, and therefore I was terrible at interviewing. I was also terrible at coding interviews, so even though I did land a few interviews, holy shit I was a waste of the engineers' time. I was lucky enough to end up where I did for my sophomore summer 2025, a hundred thanks to the engineers at Cepton for passing me even though I could not find the depth of a binary tree and subsequently putting me on the coolest low-level graphics project ever.
Anyways it was at this time (summer 2025) my best friend in the world, who is not even a year older than me but had just graduated university, got into NVIDIA as a full-time systems software engineer. Mind you I was still sophomore and barely touched systems-level stuff yet, and I genuinely crashed out so much every day about how behind I truly was as an engineer, skill-wise and project wise. Bro it was so bad, it still is. I needed to get my shit together and get a software engineering internship; the best experience is industry experience!
Salesforce: I started applying to Summer 2026 software engineering internships in May 2025. My first interview was during June or July (six or seven1!!!!!! six seven!!!) with one of Salesforce's university recruiting efforts, some program that tried to bag the university talent before the massive wave of internships open in the Fall. If I got in, I would have gotten a Salesforce San Francisco office visit and a subsequent offer. Well, I bombed the interview! My first round was a coding technical. The questions were deadass two leetcode easies and I couldn't answer the second one in full!!! Wahoo1!! I realized that I was a stupid chud and had to start Leetcode. Yes I was terrible at Leetcode and barely touched it before then! I had so much to get good at.
Microsoft: Come August, the amount of job postings really came out! I had finished my internship and wrote some more stuff on my resume, though looking back on it now it is not even remotely good. I am surprised I got an interview from them. Anyways a recruiter reached out to me, and I had to schedule my availability but I was only allowed a few available dates, all bounded within a week. They run a tight ship! I also bombed this interview! When will I learn! My interview was 1 hour technical/behavioral, where I was taken aback by even questions regarding the project I did; specifically, I was terrible at describing it to someone with no context (straight up working on a low-level graphics engine in Rust and the novel WGPU programming, that simulates different models of LiDAR overlayed over synthetic 3d objects and it collects data, my project being to overlay real LiDAR capture data over the existing rendering pipeline so the data is more high fidelity and it fix the problem of synthetic data not being good enough, easy, right?). And then I fluffed the technicaL question, it was some medium-level array question, and I solved it optimially for most cases, but I did not talk out edge cases in the beginning and screwed myself over as I strugged to fix the code. These mistakes are so elementary but I guess you have to fail to truly understand.
Oracle OCI: This was in September? Maybe? I'm not gonna lie I don't like them. I scheduled my interview, I show up, my interviewer doesn't show up, I wait 20 minutes. I email my recruiter, we reschedule for the next day. Interviewer is not apologetic, which is fine because there is always a power imbalance between interviewer and interviewee but it doesn't feel great of course! I do my coding interviews in Python, but my interviewer primarily used Java. I definitely got stuck on some Python syntax (my fault) and he told me to learn the language better. He is indeed right, it is my fault that I did not have the intuition to figure out how to fix my bug, so I practiced a lot more after this. A person can defintiely appreciate and take the advice despite not liking the person whatesoever.
Gusto: they have a strange automated interview scheduling and rescheduling system. You just use a website for all scheduling, interview confirmation, rescheduling, finding the interview information, meeting link etc. Guy was really nice. I got asked a leetcode hard. Oopsies!
Pinterest: I passed their OA, which is non-automatic I believe. I got rejected after recruiter call. I do not know what happened there, I guess I cursed her whole family and bloodline or something.
Adobe: Passed their non-automatic OA with full score. Rejected!
Linkedin (my savior!!!): I like these guys. I actually have lore. I interviewed with them as a sophomore and failed, but my recruiter is a nice lady and called me to provide me feedback (missed the mark in coding and explaining the stuff I've done so far--note how there's a trend so far lol.) Also, they reached out to Cornell students during Spring 2025 and let us visit their NYC office. I got to talk to their engineers and I really like this one lady (shoutout Jelanah queen shit) Anyways at this point I really wanted to get an intern offer from them, also it was October and I've not yet an offer so I was stressed! I applied the HOUR of the application dropping. I alreadY know their process is 1. resume screen 2. OA 3. recruiter conversation. 4. final round, 1 behavioral, 1 technical. I scrape by full score on the OA. Then I have my recruiter call with the same based lady. Then I schedule my final round to accidentally end right before my CS4620 computer graphics midterm. Oops! Anyways I first have my behavioral round with hiring manager, I am allowed to discuss the stuff on my resume that is most interesting to me and that answers the question best. I discuss my previous internship and my graphics engine written in C++ and CUDA and the optimizations I made most of all (backface culling, asked google, asked people better than me, etc.) along with the stuff I do at school as a CS major stupid chud. Then my technical was with two dudes in one room and I am shitting bricks, but I solve the first medium-level question with no problem, except I miss the fact that if you are continously appending a string, to use a list-based approach and just "".join at the end becuase strings are immutable so each time you append you are makign a new one haha oops, second question was a binary tree qusetion, no problem solving that one, but I kept saying "let's move these bad boys here" (bad boys referring to blocks of code or comments) and made the "absolute cinema" pose at the end and I cringe to this day thinking about that. Anyways exactly one week later I get the verbal offer with nice feedback from my recruiter this time! Your girl is employed! But the physical offer letter was slightly delayed becuase Grace Hopper Conference was just around the block, and LinkedIn had a booth there. I found my recruiter there at their hella cool booth and asked her about my offer letter lmao and they sent it that night! They also gave me a LinkedIn Stanley Cup, for those who were either in the interview process or had accepted an offer from them. Needless to say it was a good interview process, I was probably the most deterministic for LinkedIn. Genuinely thank god bro.
Capitol One: Somehow I got an interview for their PM intern roles, which was very intersting because my resume is very technical. My first round was talking about product intuition and various case studies and hypothetical situations with my interviewer. She was really kind and a Cornell alum. I actaully passed this round, and C1 was nice with mentorship, they paired another Cornell alum to hop on a call with me before my "powerday" (which is just final interview round with many back to backs.) I apprecdiate that. Powerday was with 4 dudes back to back who did not know each other and did not want to be there. I got rejected but that is ok, though they aren't allowed to give feedback after allat. Like bro. Also this was the day after LinkedIn LMAO.
Bloomberg: This was now November. I recieved an offer to interview, earliest possible date was December though, which is kinda crazy. I saw somewhere that they reached intern headcount too, so I declined it becuase I was a tired chud at this point.
NVIDIA: bruh this started in december it lasted 2 months. i interviewed with 2 teams and got rejected from both LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO