Landing an internship in SF bay with 1 year of CS?

1 points by andy93 ↗ HN
I am a freshman at a private liberal arts university in the midwest. My school has a good reputation, but not for computer science. On top of that, I am in a horrible location to find good internships in the tech industry. My goal is to move to the SF Bay area, find a good internship, and continue my education out there. I have been learning programming since the start of my senior year in high school, so I have more experience than many first year CS students. I also have done some web development with django and jQuery. I feel I have Python down pretty well for my level (I know it much better than Java-which all of my CS classes are taught in here). I also know HTML and CSS fairly well, and have put together some basic sites using this and javascript which I am still learning. I have been exposed to some web services, and have one website using Amazon's EC2 and S3.

So this is basically the technical experience I have, I feel I have a decent foundation but I know I am lacking depth. Part of this problem is my location, my university doesn't have many opportunities to get out in the community and work on projects. There is no motivation to start projects/businesses/etc. It definitely has a focus on problem solving rather than building things, and THEN solving the problems we encounter. This is why I want to change locations. I really want to get in to the start up scene, and I would love to be a part of a tech driven community. Right now I am focusing on adding some depth to my skills by working on some more Python/django projects. What is the market like in the Bay area for someone with skills like me, could I get an internship, would I be able to get a paid internship that could turn in to a job? What other tips do you have for me in this situation? Thanks in advance!

3 comments

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Do you have a portfolio or links to anything you've worked on?

If not, that would be a good first step.

I do have a couple of links that I could share with anyone interested, but I am currently in the process of building a portfolio website.
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