A Noob’s Journey To An International Internship Offer
How weird right? You might think Pranay’s self-deprecating again or he’s joking yada yada. But those who actually know me, know that I do not possess extraordinary DSA skills or development skills. I personally know some of my batchmates and some of my seniors who were much superior to me in terms of skills and knowledge.
Still curious about how I grabbed a Software Engineering Internship role at JP Morgan Chase at their London Office? Let’s see how I did it :)
A Little Bit About Me
I always dreamt of going abroad ever since I was a kid. I used to see newspaper ads for travel agencies having different travel packages and whenever I asked my parents if we could go, they used to say “One day when you’ll grow older, you will take us there.” This was one of my oldest dreams, going to any foreign country once without any financial support from them, all on my own.
Fast forwarding to 2018, I was a bright kid at school but still ended up messing with my JEE (read: really really badly). I was well prepared but due to a panic attack right in the middle of the paper, I couldn’t perform well. What followed was months of depression, self-doubts and anxiety attacks. I was completely shattered and broken at that time, I had to cut off from everyone I knew and had to spend a lot of time alone. But life was generous enough to offer me a second chance, so I took a drop year, studied around 17–18 hours per day from scratch, lost contact with all my friends and made sure my every second counted.
So, 2019 JEE comes in and I just nail it. I finally got an admission offer from IIT, a dream my father had for me for years but then, how could Pranay Kothari’s life ever be easy? I had to turn down the offer since I wasn’t getting the branch of my choice in IIT Guwahati, and instead take up Computer Science and Engineering with Artificial Intelligence at NSUT, Delhi. I always regretted the decision, but finally came to terms with it.
So, since Day 1 at NSUT, I made up my mind that I wanna fulfil my childhood dream of making it abroad and I knew going there isn’t an easy task, that only people in IITs used to get international placement opportunities(so I thought), let’s go for masters as it was the easiest route. I used to literally daydream about studying in TU Munich, Germany in my drop year and was 100% determined that I will do anything to go there for my masters.
Pre-Covid Life at NSUT
Coming in with a pre-determined goal, I knew I had to do something to make myself stand apart from the general college crowd of 1100+ students. So, since I had a Computer Science background from high school, I started coding in my first semester aggressively. By the start of the second semester, I was at my peak and was as prepared as a pre-final year undergrad eyeing internships at top firms.
I also came out of my comfort zone and got into various student clubs in my uni, such as the newspaper society, the quiz club, the debating society, the mars rover robotics team, etc. I personally credit them for personality development and for helping me able to network with a lot of people.
The Covid Phase
The world wasn’t prepared for this and neither was I. It was a life-changing phase for me, as now I got a lot of time to introspect and learn a lot of new stuff. So April 2020, during my second semester, our classes were suspended and one day, I was ranting to one of my favourite seniors about life and told him about my ambitions and future goals about how serious I was about pursuing a masters in future. He helped me land my first research internship at IIIT Delhi. I started my development journey then and once I realised how much I love solving real-world problems, I stopped practising DSA questions (until just before on-campus intern season xD) and focused on learning new dev skills instead. This was an important point in my life, as my skills and experience grew exponentially during this period.
As soon as my fourth semester started, I was confident in my development skills and was prepared to take part in hackathons. I participated in Hack NIT Patna, my first hackathon, and since we were there to learn, we decided to do something adventurous and make our project on Blockchain. Over the course of the next 2–3 days, we worked like maniacs, built a project on web3 and to our surprise ended up winning that hackathon, out of 100+ teams from all across India. This particular hackathon taught me a lot, not just about coding but also about teamwork, time management, presentation skills, and remaining calm under pressure. After this, I participated in around 12–13 hackathons over the next 4–5 weeks. Won a few of them, while performing terribly in the rest. But I had a lot of fun participating in each one of them and made some unforgettable memories.
I got the opportunity to continue my research work at IIIT Delhi during the summer of 2021, and while I knew what was ahead of me, I still chose to pursue my research work and continue doing what I loved.
On-Campus Internship Season
Just before the start of our third year, numerous companies started visiting our campus, offering summer internship offers. What every company looks for in candidates are good DSA and problem-solving skills, along with a decent CGPA (and I had neither hehe). As I spent my entire summer vacation working as a research intern while others were preparing for the internship season, I knew I wouldn’t be able to secure an on-campus offer. And that’s what actually happened. I was very much inclined towards research, but due to peer pressure and seeing my other batchmates, I kind of forgot what my actual goals were. After I got rejected by Google, our first on-campus company, I started practising DSA questions again aggressively in the hope to secure an on-campus internship offer.
Almost a month passes by, and around 40–45 big companies have already visited our campus by now, most of my friends have already secured an internship offer while I don’t receive even a single interview call. Big L moment if you ask me. I remember on 15th August, I got so so frustrated that I saw no hope of getting an on-campus offer. That’s when I made up my mind to start applying for off-campus opportunities.
Off-Campus Internship Hunt
I started off by making a separate email-id specifically for applying to all the off-campus opportunities, then made a list of all the companies which came to our campus, visited each company’s career portal and applied to all the internship openings irrespective of the location.
JP Morgan was one of the companies I applied to during this time. After I applied there, I received two HireVue test links, one for the Software Engineering Intern role and the second one for the AI & Data Science Intern role.
I gave both tests back-to-back and started off with the test for the AI role first. It contained 5 questions basically, 3 easy level DSA questions and 2 behavioural questions. After coding the DSA questions, I was asked to explain my approach and talk about further optimisations. After this, I started the test for the software role, it contained 2 easy-medium level DSA questions, which were pretty much straightforward. Again, I was asked to record my approach and if optimisations were possible for the code I submitted.
A few weeks pass by and I didn’t hear back from them, but suddenly one day, I receive an email from a JPMC recruiter based in New Jersey encouraging me to apply for the Code For Good for the US offices, to increase my chances to get recruited. I applied instantly and guess what? I received the rejection mail the next day :) Frustrated me thought maybe I should try and apply for the Code For Good for UK offices as well, so without any hope and much expectation, I applied blindly for it.
2–3 weeks after this, I received my first and only on-campus interview call from one of the Big 4, Deloitte. I cleared all the 3 interviews and got an offer as a Deloitte Application Studios intern role for their Hyderabad office. Although I got a sense of relief after working so hard for it, I was never really happy with the offer.
Again, after a few months of silence, I suddenly received an email asking me to join the virtual Q&A session for the Code For Good for the EMEA region, which was really strange since I never received any info regarding whether I was shortlisted for it or not. And shortly afterwards, finally received a mail that I got shortlisted to participate in the hackathon :))
Code For Good
Code For Good is a hackathon conducted by JP Morgan Chase for all their offices once a year to give students a chance to collaborate with other coders to develop innovative technology solutions to solve real-world problems for not-for-profit organisations. I was amongst the 110 people that were shortlisted for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) region out of thousands of applications.
15th October 2021: I went into the hackathon without any expectations, I already had an internship offer with me and kept my “got nothing to lose mentality” throughout the period of hacking. I was assigned a random team, containing 2 people from UK and Nigeria each, and we decided to work on Speak Out Scotland’s problem statement to track a patient’s mental health while waiting for a therapist’s appointment and suggest them resources based on it.
We were mentored and guided by 2–3 mentors, who were also working at JPMC, and they stayed on the zoom meeting throughout the duration of the hackathon to help us with any doubts we had. They also asked us some technical and behavioural questions and overlooked all the discussions of our team.
Since I had a lot of previous hackathon experience, I decided to take the charge of the team and led the discussions regarding the structure of our project & single-handedly worked on the backend and contributed to the presentation as well. It was really an amazing experience, I had never worked with an international team before this and got lots of opportunities to network with other people.
Our team was successful in submitting the project just a few minutes before the deadline and although our team couldn’t win, I believe I performed well enough and gave my 100%.
A few weeks later, on Diwali night, I received a call from a recruiter that I was being offered a Software Engineering Internship role at their London office :))). It took me a while to digest the news to be fair, amidst all the fireworks happening outside, I remember after the call I literally screamed and jumped. All the years of hard work, right from JEE, finally felt worth it.
Conclusion
Looking back, I think it was all fate, from me failing in my first attempt at JEE, joining NSUT instead of IIT Guwahati, choosing research instead of practising DSA, getting rejected from 150+ companies within 3 months, to finally getting one life-changing opportunity.
I can’t express how grateful I am for all the opportunities I have got till now and finally realised that life’s really really unpredictable. I truly believe that experiencing failures is important so that one day when you finally achieve something, you are truly able to appreciate it.
To the stars that listen, and dreams that are answered!
See ya in the funny papers,
Pranay
