Ask HN: I'm a high school student. Is my job searching strategy flawed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I'm a high school student. Is my job searching strategy flawed?

8 points_yfoe11 comments

I've been on the lookout for summer internship opportunities at bay area/SV startups for ~3 months now. I haven't heard back from... all but one of the ~20 companies I've emailed, and I'm curious as to if this is the behavior I should be expecting.

My cover letter is short, sweet, and proofread (mentions hackathon I won, personal projects, etc), and I've been attaching my resume ([url-redacted]) to it. The emails I send out are generally to generic jobs@company.tld email addresses, which I feel are eating up my submissions and never make it to real human beings.

So I ask you: is my experience representative of all job seeking, or am I doing something wrong? Should I be seeking out employees to reach out to? Is your company even remotely interested in filling pre-undergrad positions, and if so, does my pitch reach the barrier of entry for consideration?

(email == [email-redacted], if you'd like to talk privately to me)

Think about it from their perspective. Imagine you are an HR person, maybe if its a start up the CTO, and you receive the application you've been sending out. How would you react? Would the application be memorable? Would it impress you and make you think, this person seems like they are really enthusiastic about working at our company and they have impressive skills?

To this end, I'd say make sure you show them something you've built that's up and running and 100% completed. It only has to be just one thing, but make sure its impressive - something you're proud of and would consider your best piece of work. Send it as a link in your initial email.

Anything unique and cool that makes you stick out is good. Why not strap up your resume as an interactive app designed specifically for that startup you really want to intern for? Or whoever said you had to send a standard resume word doc? Why not mock up a sweetly designed resume - even if you're a programmer it shows motivation and ability to think outside the box. (See this link for inspiration: http://dzineblog.com/2011/09/35-brilliant-resume-designs.htm...)

Also, Looking over your resume I see a lot of stuff but nothing that looks like its completed (maybe it is but the resume doesn't show it). I'd also scratch anything from your resume that doesn't impress. The link to http://countervailinteractive.com goes to an expired domain, so I can't see what your skills are like, so I'd get that working or scratch it if you can't. Saying you built one website doesn't do much to get you in the door.

Anyways, I hope I didn't sound to harsh, I like seeing young people enthusiastic about programming and would like to see you get that internship. Good luck :)

I absolutely see what you mean about releasing polished projects-- you're saying I should spend some time getting products launched for real instead of just taking on learning projects repeatedly. That's a good message to take to heart. :)

Not overly harsh at all! Thank you for the valuable advice and the heads-up on the dead domain.

In my humble opinion, firing off an email is a lost cause. HR folks are blasted all the time and it's really hard for them to "separate the wheat from the chaff" as they say.

Your idea of getting in touch with the employees is the right direction. You need to connect with someone personally from these companies. Connect with them on LinkedIn, hit them on Twitter, friend them on Facebook. Be wherever they are.

Also, consider posting your resume and cover-letter within a Hacker News posting asking for advice... oh wait...

Some of my thoughts:

It is very common for high schooler resumes to get no attention. After all, these companies want college interns. And to top it off, you're a high school sophomore. Most HS seniors never get internships either.

I'll second what jfaucett said. It is much more important to show 1-2 projects that you actually shipped, rather than 10 projects you never finished. This should make intuitive sense.

Things on your resume that are not very impressive: 1) Your GPA (high school GPAs are meaningless to a startup) 2) Software Dev Club VP (high school club leadership is meaningless to a startup)

Honestly, it's a turn off when the first 3 things I see on your resume are that you're a sophomore in HS, your GPA, and a club leadership position, since I know how meaningless those things are. You should put your experience/projects at the top, since those are the most impressive. I'm not saying that you shouldn't include those other things (GPA, club), but they should be at the bottom of your resume.

Some notes 1) Get your app on the Google Play store. 2) Add a link to your django-based news aggregator 3) Countervail is down. Get a version up on your own domain (randallma.com) and link to it just so you can show it off.

In fact, you should get your personal website up and running so that you can have a digital resume that actually shows people your projects (with links and screenshots). A drab resume is not going to get past HR.

Your Hackers&Founders description also has a grammar error.

Finally, the high school students I know who got internships at software companies ALL had some sort of inside connection - typically through their parents or a family friend. See if your parents have any contacts they can leverage.

I'd agree with some of this. HS resumes are going to get binned unless you prove otherwise. Your resume might be decent in getting a "high school" job like a supermarket, but it's still not great.

I think the Software Dev Club VP could be something, but you don't explain it at all. What is it? Did you cofound it? What do you do as VP? Accomplishments?

Your resume is somewhat fluff. You have skills, but it takes up >1/3 of the page without much to show for it. Try 2 column for skills. I'd also move it to the bottom, since your experience should speak for the skills you have, the skills are just a reminder^H^H^H^Hkeyword spam and list other things that may have not been included.

Not enough info at that point? Try speaking to some of your hackathons. It's an extracurricular thing.

One trick for designing resumes is to flip it upside down and look at the text as shapes rather than words. How is it balanced? Are there noticeable gaps, and are those intentional or should they be filled in?

Also, cover letters should be custom for each job. If you template them it's really only 1 paragraph you should have saved, and the rest should be custom per job.

As a high school student, don't send to jobs@. How do you even know the mail alias exists and actually gets looked at? Send to somebody.

EDIT: One last thing -- your resume is pretty flat. You are obviously strong technically, but you have no reference to teams or working with others. Hence why you should expand Club VP (maybe to experience section). If you do volunteering or organized something or did a Boy Scout project, I'd put that on there. You do get a bit of resume forgiveness as an intern that you don't get professionally.

I've looked over resumes for interns before, and basically you know that the most you can hope for is technically strong. Most of the time you want strong soft skills and they just grow technical skills through the internship. You don't show me any of the soft skills.

Two things I would like to disagree with / clarify:

1) Just to be clear, the software dev club VP position is not a negative, just that it's not going to impress anyone. And honestly I can't think of situations in which it would. Co-founding a club in college, let alone HS, is very easy.

2) I disagree with the statement that "Most of the time you want strong soft skills and they just grow technical skills through the internship." Keep things in perspective. It's hard for a HS sophomore to impress on the soft skills side of the equation. I mean, even something that might be impressive to a college in admissions, like organizing a community service outing, is not going to be very relevant to a startup engineering internship. I actually think the way that you shine on your resume is to have extremely strong technical skills. If I know you have exceptional technical skills, I am assured you will be a useful contributor. If I am assured that you have exceptional soft skills, that still does not tell me how much you will be able to contribute. It's not like you'll be doing biz dev or sales. Looking through your github profile, it's hard for me to get a handle on your technical ability, which is why I recommend having a personal website with a visual portfolio (screenshots) of your projects and more detailed descriptions of the technical challenges and features of your projects.

I am not saying that you should neglect the soft skills side of things. Be involved in clubs. I cannot stress how important it is in the general scheme of things to be involved in something that requires public speaking. Club leadership is not public speaking. Something like theater or debate is. The payoff for those things shows itself in college admissions and in life after college when you have to deal with people and managers. As an intern you are not likely to face interpersonal challenges that require articulation and persuasion.

Well, maybe one approach would be to search Hacker News for popular tech companies and see names of people at the company and then e-mail them? Ethical? I dunno. Attention grabbing? Probably.

Dropbox. E-Mail Drew Houston. Twitter/Square. E-Mail Jack Dorsey. Google. E-Mail Kevin Rose.

I dont't know how much this would help but maybe worth a try...

Kevin Rose also does a Foundation Podcast, a bunch of which are here in the bay area. Maybe review those for potential people to contact.

Haven't heard of the Foundation Podcast before/will definitely take a look at it. Thanks for the heads up!

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4079567

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EDIT: In short, open source contributions help a lot. (also: you'll have better luck finding not just jobs, but also valuable connections on HN, than anywhere else)

I'm a HS student and you basically have to know people/get personal referrals. Sent you a message

You should probably try emailing one real person at each company; after that it's a lost cause.

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