Internship recruiting playbook
How I scored 11 interviews and 6 internship offers in 2025, plus REU advice and the interview formats I keep seeing.
Over the past year I went through more than 15 interviews, landed 6 internship offers in 2025, and picked up an incoming SWE intern role at LinkedIn on top of my co-op at Northrop Grumman. A lot of ColorStack and CodePath folks have asked how I approached recruiting, so I pulled everything into one place: applying, REUs, and interview prep.
This is the advice I wish I had in one doc instead of scattered across LinkedIn posts.
How I scored 11 interviews and 6 offers (applying)
These are the four things that moved the needle most for me during application season.
1) Make impactful projects
Don't have industry experience yet? Projects are the way to go. Target something that forces you to touch frontend, backend, databases, and deployment. A full stack project that actually ships teaches you more than a folder of half-finished repos.
If you are stuck on ideas, browse Devpost and look at past hackathon winners. You do not need to reinvent the wheel. You need something you can talk about in depth: tradeoffs, bugs you fixed, and what you would do differently.
2) Use Jake's resume format
This is the most standard CS resume layout for a reason. It parses well with ATS scanners, and recruiters are used to reading it.
Link: Jake's resume template
Keep bullets outcome-focused (metrics, scale, impact). One page. No fluff columns that break parsers.
3) Where to apply
I used three sources in parallel:
There is overlap between them, but many companies only post on one channel. Using all three helped me catch most of the major openings instead of missing roles that never showed up in my main feed.
Apply early, track everything in a spreadsheet (company, role, date applied, referral, status), and follow up when you have a warm contact.
4) Go to in-person recruiting events
The event I went to was the SHPE National Convention. I walked out with 4 interviews and 2 offers from that trip alone.
Some companies at these events are hiring on-site or on a 1 to 2 week timeline. If you are struggling to get past the resume screen, talking directly to a recruiter is often the easiest path to at least one real conversation.
Other conferences and career fairs worth looking into: NSBE, Grace Hopper, local university fairs, and company-specific campus events.
The internship path people sleep on: REUs
There is a whole lane of summer opportunities that do not get enough hype: Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs).
For most REU applications there are no interviews. You write an essay about your story and why you fit the program. Given how intense technical interviews have gotten, that is one of the most accessible breakthroughs you can get early in college.
In 2023 I applied to 13 programs and got into 5. Most programs cover room and board plus a stipend, typically around $5K to $6.5K for about 8 to 10 weeks. You work with a professor in their lab for the summer.
The skills transfer. During my REU I spent a lot of time on ML and data processing, which directly helped me land my first industry internship afterward.
Most application windows are closed right now, but they open again in a few months. Good places to plan ahead:
Start a list of programs, deadlines, and essay drafts early. REU essays reward clarity and genuine interest more than a perfect GPA line.
Interview formats (after 15+ interviews)
Once applications convert, interviews tend to fall into a few buckets. Here is what I kept seeing.
Behavioral
Probably the most common type you will hit at least once. Some rounds are only behavioral.
Usually a vibe and competency check. Often a non-technical interviewer. Prepare STAR stories: conflict, failure, leadership, tight deadline, learning something fast. Have 6 to 8 stories you can adapt instead of memorizing 30 one-offs.
LeetCode style
Still common, but not every loop includes it. Questions often map to NeetCode 150 categories or company-tagged lists on LeetCode.
The hard part is either knowing the trick or finding the optimal time and space complexity under pressure. Practice explaining your approach out loud before you code. Practice follow-ups: edge cases, tests, complexity.
Object-oriented / real-world implementation
These are showing up more often than pure algorithm trivia at some companies (I have seen this at places like Reddit, Nvidia, and Sigma Computing).
You usually do not need obscure algorithms. They want clean, readable code that solves a practical problem. The challenge is holding the full problem in your head and structuring classes or modules sensibly.
Practice building small systems on a whiteboard or in a shared editor: design the interfaces first, then implement.
System design
As AI tooling spread, I noticed more loops testing conceptual understanding instead of only live coding. Design questions are getting more common even for internships.
Expect high-level diagrams, tradeoffs, and scaling questions. For internships, focus on fundamentals: APIs, databases, caching, queues, load balancers, and how you would evolve a design as traffic grows.
I would bet infrastructure-heavy design questions keep growing for intern roles too. Brush up on how the systems you have used at work or in projects actually run in production.
Closing thoughts
Recruiting is a numbers game, but it is not random. Strong projects, a clean resume, multiple application channels, and in-person events got me in the door. REUs were an underrated parallel path. Once interviews started, knowing which format I was walking into made prep much less chaotic.
If you are in ColorStack, CodePath, SHPE, or any student org: share notes, mock each other, and track what worked. The pipeline is brutal, but it is learnable.
Good luck this season. Build something real, apply everywhere that fits, and show up ready for whichever interview style they throw at you.