Ask HN: Any international F1 kids got internships in the US?

4 points by karangoeluw 12y ago ↗ HN

So I've been here for over a year, studying in one of the best CS programs in the country, working on a LOT of projects, with research experience. My resume [1] has been able to fetch me interviews with a ton of companies - both big and small - for summer SDE positions.

I know this for a fact that I have nailed all my interviews. They have all gone as well as I expected, with great feedback from the interviewers afterwards. But for some reason, I have been unable to get an offer.

This has made me really, really demotivated. Is it because I'm international, and it's hard for companies to get H1 visas in case they want to extend a full time offer?

I just want to know what to make of all this? What id going wrong? What should I fix? What do others think of this?

[1] http://www.goel.im/Karan.Goel.Resume.pdf

4 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] thread

yitchelle 12y ago ↗

Check out this thread for the many, many reasons how this can happened. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7040382

Good luck!

karangoeluw 12y ago ↗

Not sure how this is relevant to me.q

simarpreet007 12y ago ↗

I'm an international student at University of Waterloo (Canada). I don't think being international makes you or labels you any different than what you can be otherwise. In fact, most of my employers (direct team members) hardly ever know this fact, which makes sense as your nationality has nothing to do with how you will do the job.

Not sure how H1 works but in my case I've been given offers to work as an intern in the US on the basis of a J1 visa.

I'd say keep trying and working on side projects in the mean time. Good Luck!

spiderPig 12y ago ↗

Wait, did you come here via some sort of transfer program? How do you graduate so soon? If so, I'd suggest you list it in your resume. I'm Indian and did my Bachelors here as well. H1-B shouldn't be a problem at all, not at least for the big ones (MSFT, AMZN, GOOG, FB et al). I've been on recruiting teams for a couple of them. They just look for talent. Often times, it's easy to get an illusion that you did really well in interviews. Interviewers are trained to not show any visible signs of not being satisfied with the candidate. Even if you did well, there are a lot of other factors (For example, if we've been told to recruit 5 students from your uni, and we see 6 good guys, we still choose the top 5). Interviews are very far from a perfect system and companies usually be on the safe side and favor false negatives rather than the other way around. So don't get disappointed. Just have fun coding. Apply for masters programs on the side and try again. I wasn't able to score one after my freshman year (in my defense, i hadn't taken a data structures course yet :). However, did two subsequent ones at AMZN and MSFT.