With internship application season in full swing, you might be wondering how to make the most of your summer gig — and turn it into a full-time offer.
Landing an internship at a Big Tech company is highly competitive, but having one on your résumé can help you get in early. Google offers general online guidance for navigating the hiring process, like being specific about projects you’ve worked on or managed, and keeping your résumé one page.
Business Insider spoke to six former Google interns who turned their summer gigs into full-time job offers at the tech giant. They shared their process of landing internships and advice for landing a permanent offer:
Nancy Qi
Nancy Qi returned to Google full-time last June after spending three summers there as an intern, the first two with STEP, its more junior engineering internship, and the last with Google’s Software Engineering internship, which is a more competitive program geared toward technical development.
Her primary advice: Start early.
Qi said she started taking data structure classes in high school at a community college and was practicing with LeetCode the summer before she started college, well before she had interviews lined up.
When Qi started sending out applications in the fall of her freshman year, she said her résumé mainly had website initiatives and leadership experience for volunteering clubs from high school. She said she also had some part-time tutoring experience teaching math and English,
“I think at that age, you’re not expected to have so much CS experience or coding experience,” Qi said. “So I think if you have some leadership experience or experience that shows your character, I think that’s important at that time.”
During her internship, Qi said she thinks her strong suit was building relationships with her teammates by getting lunch with them every day. She said doing helped to create “team chemistry,” and she also said it helped her feel excited for work and “motivated to pump out code.”
Islina (Yunhong) Shan
Islina (Yunhong) Shan interned at Google three times, beginning in the summer of 2022. She graduated from an accelerated computer science Master’s program at Duke University and started a full-time role as a software engineer at the tech giant this spring.
Shan first participated in STEP and later in the Software Engineering Internship.
When she applied for her first internship, Shan said she had some hackathon experiences and some technical projects from school. After she sent her résumé, she was invited to two rounds of final interviews, both of which were technical and back-to-back, she said.
Her advice to interns hoping to secure full time jobs: Choose a team during the match process that you’re actually interested in.
“Interest is really important in driving you to finish the project,” Shan said.
She also said it’s important to choose a team with a manager you can see yourself working with because you’ll have to communicate with them regularly.
When she first started her internship, she said she set unrealistic goals. Once she adjusted expectations, she started seeing more progress. Shan suggested seeking help if needed, adding that Google engineers tend to be friendly.
Lydia Lam
Lydia Lam graduated from college in 2024 and participated in three Google internships, beginning with a STEP internship in 2021.
In her internship résumé, Lam included a seven-week Google program for high-school graduates called the Computer Science Summer Institute. She also had experience with a summer program for girls who code and a tech consulting student organization that she joined during her first semester of college.
Lam also recommended applying early in the recruiting cycle and said programs geared toward first and second-year students tend to be more aligned with that experience level.
Lam said “strong engineering practices” are highly valued at the company and mentioned feeling imposter syndrome and wanting to impress her internship host. However, she said asking questions sooner rather than later can help projects get done more quickly.
“It’s much more efficient to ask someone else who knows a lot more than you try to figure it out longer,” Lam said.
She also suggested “producing a lot of artifacts,” whether designs or other “tangible pieces of work,” that can help show your skill set and contributions.
Tawfiq Mohammad
Tawfiq Mohammad interned for two summers at Google before becoming a full-time software engineer at the tech giant.
He said the summer after his first year in college, he didn’t have any internships, so he took summer classes and did his own projects at home, like a gadget that read the license plate on his car and opened the garage without him having to press a button.
Mohammad’s biggest advice for incoming interns is to be prepared for imposter syndrome. Mohammad said the “biggest block” for him at first was being scared to do anything, and he suggested tuning out those negative feelings as much as possible.
“You’re going to feel very out of place initially,” Mohammad told Business Insider. “I honestly felt like I had no idea what I was doing.”
He said interns should set a goal to “learn as much as possible” from the more experienced employees and try to believe that they, too, felt like they didn’t fully “know what they were doing” at one point.
“They’re really smart so you want to absorb as much information as you can from them,” Mohammad said.
He also suggested thinking “outside the box.”
“You’re going to be given a project that summer and try to own that project. Try to own it from A to Z,” Mohammad said.
He also recommended networking with other interns and team members, adding that Google provides a number of opportunities to do so.
“It’s good to build up a good network of successful people and it’s just good to network with people that are farther along the career path than you,” Mohammad said.
Zachary Weiss
Zachary Weiss interned at Google for three summers before landing a full-time job as a software engineer in the Cloud department. He said he wasn’t thinking about summer internships when he started as a freshman at the University of Michigan, but an older computer science major encouraged him to apply to Google’s STEP program.
Google interns are given a summer project, and Weiss said that being proactive and anticipating problems in advance is key to excelling in the role.
He said a former internship manager complimented him for identifying an issue with a “one in a thousand” chance of occurring. He said interns should think about all the “weird edge cases” and speak up instead of waiting for a manager to say something.
“You’re given work that would have been going to a full-time employee,” Weiss said, adding that employees value your opinion and voice.
Weiss said communication was another key skill that he didn’t expect to be as important. He said that in school, students tend to focus on learning the principles, algorithms, and data structures involved in programming. In a workplace, though, verbal skills matter, too, Weiss said.
“My day-to-day, I speak a lot more English. I read a lot more English. I read and write and talk and communicate a lot more than I am actually coding,” Weiss said. “And I think communication is something that’s really important.”
He said that at the University of Michigan, there were three courses about technical communications, like writing design memos, emails, and presentations. He said many students didn’t take the class seriously, and it ended up teaching a crucial skill.
Victoria Rozanska
Before Victoria Rozanska took on multiple roles across continents at Google, she interned there. She said she first applied to an internship through Google’s website by following its CV guidelines. She said she remembers receiving a rejection email initially, followed by an interview months later.
She said she went through three rounds of interviews and then received an internship offer. She said that while she didn’t have experience at the time, she thinks having a “growth mindset” helped her succeed as an intern and eventually become a full-time employee, strategic partnerships development associate.
“Mostly it was focusing on growing my network, asking questions, and having this growth mindset, which can also help to establish your position in the company,” Rozanska said.
She said she was able to make a name for herself by being curious about others in terms of the work they did.
“Asking questions and being open-minded with this company,” is key,” Rozanska said.
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