Journal of 2021 Spring Internship Recruitment
During the spring recruitment of 2021, I was a first-year graduate student, also known as the class of '23. Since I wanted to find a summer internship, I could only go through the regular internship route. I only knew that Tencent, ByteDance, Xiaomi, and Meituan would recruit regular interns. So, I started applying. However, this time during the spring recruitment, I only received an offer from Tencent. I applied to Tencent, Meituan, and ByteDance, and I didn't get to apply to Xiaomi before I received an offer from Tencent, so I decided not to continue with the other applications. It's a bit low probability to apply to three companies and only get an offer from one. Maybe I'm just not that good. Still, my interview pass rate is okay. As long as I interviewed, I always passed. Of course, for companies like Meituan, after the interview, I didn't hear back and they didn't even send a thank-you letter, so I just considered it as a pass, haha.
Let's summarize my situation. If we count the application I sent to Baidu at the end of last year, I applied to four companies for internships in 2021, and in the end, I only received an offer from Tencent. Honestly, I'm quite satisfied because I'm from the class of '23, so getting an internship offer is already pretty good, haha!
Tencent was my first battle this year, and it was a success. I interviewed with the PC game platform department - WeGame product center, a total of 3+1 interviews. The interviews were mainly focused on projects. Apart from that, I have to say Tencent's process was really slow. I started applying on March 1st, but the formal process didn't start until March 4th, and I finally received the offer on April 12th. After each interview, it was like waiting in a big pond. It was quite a challenge to wait for the results. Besides, because I hung the position of company supervisor, the audit for supervisor change also delayed the process by a week. But fortunately, the result turned out fine.
Meituan was the second company I applied to. Actually, I applied quite early, but I felt confident that I could get into Tencent, so I didn't take the written test seriously. A little overconfident, haha. Later, after being disappointed with Tencent, I started the process with Meituan. I have to give a shoutout to Meituan here. They even gave me an interview opportunity without an online assessment, haha. But honestly, that JavaScript compiler didn't even have the BigInt object. It needs an upgrade. I only had one interview with Meituan, just the first round. I did well in the coding part, except for one question I felt okay about, but after that, they didn't contact me for a long time. I think it's because as a '23 graduate, they weren't too keen on hiring me. After all, the interviewer asked several times about my '23 graduate status and how long I could intern. Anyway, I'll just take it as passing the first round, haha.
The last company I applied to was ByteDance. Honestly, I felt a bit guilty about applying to ByteDance because I didn't practice any algorithms. Most of my spring interviews were unprepared except for the first one. I did some last-minute preparation for that. But a group member insisted that I should give it a try, and since Meituan had started, I decided to proceed with both at the same time. Unfortunately, I only had one interview with ByteDance. During the second interview, the team leader told me that since I'm from the class of '23, I needed to intern continuously for six months, while those from the '22 class could intern for three months non-continuously. The person who referred me earlier had told me that non-continuous three-month internship was okay. Maybe he didn't know either. It's a pity. It felt like the situation when I interviewed with Baidu earlier and they said the timeline wasn't suitable. Haha, it felt like history repeated itself.
I had planned to start looking for internships since my first year of graduate school. As the saying goes, experience comes from setbacks. When I was in my junior year, I applied to Alibaba and my resume was rejected. I was too inexperienced back then. What could I do? I pursued a master's degree and seriously studied front-end development for a year. Then, in my first year of graduate school, I started gearing up. And that's it, haha.
When it comes to interviews, it's crucial to read more interview experiences. You must have a clear understanding of the language basics in your field and the pros and cons of their features. While it's important to read more interview experiences, you should also depth into them and not just skim through. Because it's very easy to stumble upon deeper questions. Accumulating more experience and writing blogs would be a good way. Also, you should have a relatively impressive project, as otherwise, you might not even pass the résumé screening. If the project is quite impressive, there might be more focus on project-based questions. If the project isn't particularly eye-catching, it might focus more on the fundamentals and framework principles. Additionally, if possible, work more on GitHub. Employers really like to check blogs and GitHub. Another important point is, even though referrals are common nowadays, if you have the opportunity for a referral, you should definitely go for it. There are plenty of resources to dig up referral information. If you can reach out to a familiar or compatible department, direct referrals are the best.
However, I wasn't well-prepared for this spring recruitment. Besides the first interview, I just went with the flow for the subsequent interviews. I had too much on my plate, whether it was reading research papers, attending classes, or working on small projects, I had to find time for everything. Here, I must say, I really hate classes. Let's not talk about anything else. Just because of the classes, I had to reschedule my interviews twice, and it was exhausting. Actually, before the start of the academic year, a colleague asked me to interview together. I didn't think it was urgent since it was only February. It wasn't until I saw that the colleague had already received an offer in March that I realized, if you want to succeed, you have to start early, haha. Throughout the internship search process, I also got to know several interesting colleagues, and It's quite enjoyable to go through the interviews and share experiences together. It's quite interesting. I hope my technical growth will be faster next year, and the spring recruitment will be smoother, haha.