Want to land a tech internship? A Google engineer explains how networking 'intentionally' can help
"Knowing who you want to meet, finding that common bridge between both of you, and then really learning from their experience, was a big game changer for me," Doshi told Business Insider.
Doshi suggests reaching out not only to people whose career paths you'd like to emulate, but also those with whom you share common ground, including similar personal experiences.
"I was talking to a bunch of people, and saw this software engineer who was working out of Europe, and was super inspired by her story," she said. "She was also a woman. I love to see other women in tech and also, she's European. I grew up in Belgium, so that's kind of my connecting point to her."
A foot in the door
While Doshi ended up getting a referral from the engineer in Europe, she said she wasn't initially thinking of asking for one.
Reaching out because you're genuinely interested in someone's trajectory, she added, has twofold benefits — you're likely to learn more from a less stilted conversation, and the connection you make could last throughout your career.
"I reached out to her to learn more about her story, not like, 'Hey, can I get a referral at Google?'" she said. "I actually didn't even have any intention of asking her for this internship referral, but we became friends and she let me into her life, which is what her day-to-day looks like, how she grows in the role that she's in."
Remembering that professional connections, like any relationship, are two-way streets, also goes a long way towards helping them endure, Doshi added.
"As we move and progress in our life, the way in which I think about it is, we are collecting people, and we are supporting people," she said. "And the people that will come all the way through will be the ones that you have formed a genuine bond with. If you ask someone for a referral and they give it to you, I mean, that's well and good, but five years down the line, 10 years down the line, they might not even remember who you are."
If you can't get an internship, complete a project
Since you're likely to be taking similar classes as your competition, it's what you do with that knowledge that can make you stand out, Doshi said.
Projects are the "one thing that I will say again and again and again for any student," she said.
The Google engineer partly credits her success in securing an internship to the projects she developed in her downtime.
"This is the way you can set yourself apart from 1000 other people, because if you take data structures and algorithms, and your peers take data structures and algorithms, you all have the same foundational knowledge that you are building," she told BI. "But what you do with that knowledge, what you do with the data structures and algorithms, really, really makes a difference."
There's no pressure to specialize in a niche skillset right out of the gate to impress potential employers, either, Doshi said. What you're really aiming for is a broad knowledge base and a flexible personality.
"They don't expect you to come in with tons and tons of experience," she said. "They actually care about more — can you think in a specific way, and given a situation changes, are you able to adapt to that? More than doing like 700 LeetCode questions and getting those exactly right, I tried to do more problem solving in adaptive sense."
Becoming a 'go-to' person
If and when you finally do land an internship, the challenge then becomes securing a full-time return offer.
In Doshi's case, she did her best to become integral to the teams she was placed on — being a point person for a particular issue can help you be more memorable, as well as slowly build a positive reputation with senior employees.
"If they have a bug, and they trust you enough to be like, 'Oh, Aashna, you've done something like this before. Why don't you take this up?'" she said. "That is not just giving you work. It's, 'Oh, we trust you to take something like this up.' So being that person they can trust, being that go-to person, is an absolute game changer."
Doshi also cautions interns against self-isolating. You're not expected to know everything, and shouldn't try to act like you do.
"As an intern, you are coming in with, as everyone knows, less experience than the rest of the team. The intention is to show progress," she said, adding, "The key lies in asking the right questions. A lot of people say there are no wrong questions, etc, etc. Maybe there are no wrong questions, but there are questions that are better than others, in my opinion."
Knowing how to ask for help can be just as important as knowing when — Doshi suggests presenting your questions in a way that shows you've attempted to solve the problem on your own first.
"Do your due diligence before that, which means if you're stuck, ask the right person for help," she said. "I'm going to explain that I already tried to do X, Y, Z, and it didn't work. How do I move forward?"
The goal of an internship is, after all, to absorb as much knowledge as possible. Try to avoid letting your fear of looking lost halt your progress, she added.
"So this kind of framework really accelerated my learnings, because I wasn't wasting hours and hours on something that absolutely I didn't understand or didn't work," she said. "And while I wasn't spending those hours, I still did my due diligence, which is, do my research, look through the code base."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Axios
13 minutes ago
- Axios
Trump tariff letters going to a dozen countries Monday
President Trump said the U.S. will begin sending letters Monday to other countries setting a tariff rate on their imports. Why it matters: After months of threats, Trump is abruptly re-escalating the trade war. For businesses craving certainty, who've had a period of relative calm of late, the move could once again upset that balance. It also injects a new risk into financial markets that have largely moved on to a post-tariff world. European stocks, and U.S. stock futures, fell Friday as Trump warned the letters were coming. Catch up quick: Trump told reporters late Friday aboard Air Force One that about a dozen letters would go out Monday. He didn't say which nations would be targeted, or what rates would be set. On Thursday, he said the rates in the letters would go into effect August 1 — and warned some could be as high as 70%. Yes, but: The administration has used a similar tactic before — taking an aggressive posture on coming tariffs, but with a deadline just far enough out that trading partners could still bring last-minute offers the president would be willing to accept. Reports in recent days suggest multiple trading partners, including South Korea and Thailand, are scrambling to do just that. Flashback: Trump set a new regime of sweeping global tariffs on April 2, only to pause much of it a week later. At that time, his administration promised 90 trade days in 90 days. Through the first 85 days, it made three — with the UK, China and Vietnam. In mid-May, Trump began indicating deals weren't really necessary, because the U.S. would simply send letters to trading partners in subsequent days setting a rate. He made the same threat again in mid-June, and once more late in the month, noting he preferred the letters as a simpler solution than complex talks with dozens of countries. Between the lines: Though the tariff pause is due to expire July 9, some countries, like China and Canada, have separate deadlines later in the month or next month. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has indicated the deadlines are fungible and the goal is to be done with trade deals by Labor Day. What we're watching: It's not clear how aggressive Trump intends to be with these new tariff rates.
Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
The AI Birthday Letter That Blew Me Away
In May, I asked Google's chatbot, Gemini, to write a birthday letter to my best friend. Within seconds, it spat out the most impressive piece of AI writing I have ever encountered. Instead of reading as soulless, machine-generated text, the letter felt unnervingly like something I might've actually written. 'You're probably rolling your eyes,' the letter read, after a sentence that my friend would most definitely have rolled his eyes at. All I had typed into the chatbot was a nine-word prompt containing my friend's first name and the age he was turning. But the letter referenced real moments from our friendship. One paragraph recounted a conversation we had shared on the eve of college graduation; another reflected on a challenging period we had navigated together. Gemini had even included his correct birth date. I hadn't planned to let AI write the birthday letter for me. When I opened Google Drive to type it up myself, Gemini popped up and volunteered to help out. Since the spring, when I first signed up for a free trial of Google's AI Pro subscription—normally $20 a month—Gemini has followed me around the Googleverse. The tool is akin to a souped-up version of Microsoft Clippy: In Gmail, it offers to summarize long threads and draft entire messages. In Sheets, it volunteers to assist with data analysis, generating colorful bar graphs at the click of a button. But Gemini has proved most alluring in Drive, where the chatbot can automatically find and consult relevant files before generating text. That's how Gemini was able to whip up such a good birthday letter: It already knew a lot about me (and, by association, my friend). Of all the things that chatbots excel at, they have generally not been very reliable for individualized tasks. Ask an AI tool to write an essay on, say, the history of popcorn, and you will likely get a decent response. But ask it to write a speech for your sister's wedding, and the result will probably be quite poor. You might get a better speech if you feed the chatbot a decade of your texts and emails, her wedding website, and previous toasts you've given for other loved ones. But that process takes time and effort, which most people don't put in. Tech executives dream instead of hyper-personalized chatbots that automatically have access to all of the information they might ever need. After sucking up the web to build models capable of generating coherent text, AI companies are now mining our personal troves of data to teach chatbots everything there is to know about us. Google, with its colossal data empire in tow, is particularly well positioned to lead the way. If OpenAI introduced us to the Hallmark-card version of AI writing, Google is ushering in a new chapter where chatbots are capable of drafting the sort of intimate letters you might write to your best friend. The birthday letter was just the start. Not only could Gemini write fairly convincingly in my voice; the chatbot, as I quickly learned, was teeming with my personal information. When asked, it accurately described my financial goals, my vaccination history, and my parents' physical appearances. To test the limits of how much Google knew about me, I told the chatbot to make a CIA dossier. The first section ('IDENTIFYING INFORMATION') listed my full name, email address, and current location. Not too crazy. Section two ('RELATIONSHIPS & PERSONAL HISTORY') accurately described the details of both a long-term romantic relationship and a brief high-school fling. By section three ('PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE'), the chatbot was dissecting my communication style and emotional intelligence. And in section four ('POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES'), Gemini had outlined my travel history, citing the time I had spent abroad as an exchange student, and diagnosed me as an overthinker. Not everything in the dossier was accurate. Gemini struggled to disentangle fact from fiction, occasionally confusing details from short stories I've written with real-life anecdotes. When I later asked the chatbot if it knew my birthday, it told me I was born in 2010 (wrong, though it got the date right on a second try). Even though the birthday letter was startlingly good, Gemini occasionally slipped into a more generic chatbot register—at one point, it described the future as 'everything shimmering in the distance.' Still, Gemini knows me much better than other chatbots do. When I asked ChatGPT to create a CIA dossier, it failed miserably: The bot overinterpreted my prompt, explaining that a key part of my personality was my 'taste for espionage tropes.' The other details it added were vague and unimpressive. There's a clear reason for the discrepancy. Unlike Google, OpenAI doesn't have half my lifetime's worth of my data stored up. In Gmail, I have more than 200,000 emails, amounting to 30 gigabytes, some of which date back to elementary school. My Drive contains another 45 gigabytes of files, such as chemistry study guides and travel itineraries, half-written poems and unsent love letters, budgeting spreadsheets and New Year's resolutions, insurance appeals and symptom trackers. Even if you don't spend your free time soliloquizing in Google Docs like I sometimes do, the search giant likely knows enough about you to train your own custom chatbot. Our emails, files, and browsing histories are all already at the company's fingertips. Chrome is the most popular browser in the world; almost o ne-third of the planet's emails are sent with Gmail; and Google's productivity apps have billions of users who store files across Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. That's to say nothing of Maps, YouTube, or the entire Android ecosystem. Google knows it's sitting on a gold mine. In May, at the company's annual software conference, the Gemini team lead Josh Woodward said Google's goal is to make the chatbot the most 'personal' and 'proactive' AI assistant around. He offered education as an example. College students are flocking to ChatGPT, but those same students do much of their work using Google software such as Docs and Slides. 'Imagine you're a student; you've got a big physics exam looming,' Woodward said. Gemini might see the test on your calendar a week out and send you 'personalized quizzes' based on the readings and lecture notes you've already stored in Google Drive. There are countless other ways you might use such personalized AI. When I asked Gemini to write me a cover letter, it automatically consulted several I had previously written. When I prompted Gemini to make me a summer-reading list, it first combed through email exchanges with high-school and college instructors, a list of my favorite books, and two editions of a weekly newsletter I subscribe to. Google is not the only company pushing forward with bespoke AI. Sam Altman recently described the 'platonic ideal state' for ChatGPT as a model with access to 'your whole life.' This chatbot would ingest every piece of information you had ever produced or encountered—including the books you had read, emails you had sent and received, and even conversations you'd had with your friends and family. With the explicit goal of making ChatGPT more personalized, OpenAI recently upgraded the chatbot's 'memory' feature, such that the bot is now able to reference all of a user's past conversations. But building up that data will take time. Legacy tech firms such as Apple and Microsoft do already have plenty of data to draw on, but Google is further ahead in its consumer AI efforts. Then there's Meta: The company's stand-alone AI app, which launched this spring, encourages users to link the assistant to their Facebook and Instagram accounts for 'an even stronger personalized experience.' Facebook comments and Instagram DMs, however, are simply less meaty than email exchanges and PDF documents. Google has faced a bumpy road since generative AI exploded a few years ago. The technology has presented the biggest threat yet to Google's search business, and the company's share of the market recently dropped to its lowest in a decade. At the same time, usage of Google's AI tools has skyrocketed over the past year, and the company recently rolled out a new AI search mode in an attempt to steal search queries back from the likes of ChatGPT. Now, with the company's personalization advantage, Google could surge ahead. Whether Google or another company gets there first, this new era of AI is coming. For years, we have been shedding information online through clicks and likes, photographs and files, emails and search queries. That digital exhaust is now getting a second life. Already, it can be difficult to figure out whether text that you encounter online is generated by AI. Soon, while looking back on old emails, you might even feel that way about your own writing.
Business Insider
3 hours ago
- Business Insider
Want to land a tech internship? A Google engineer explains how networking 'intentionally' can help
It's just not enough to cold apply for tech jobs anymore, said Aashna Doshi, a two-time intern turned software engineer at Google. To land a spot at a tech giant, you need to be networking "intentionally." "Knowing who you want to meet, finding that common bridge between both of you, and then really learning from their experience, was a big game changer for me," Doshi told Business Insider. Doshi suggests reaching out not only to people whose career paths you'd like to emulate, but also those with whom you share common ground, including similar personal experiences. "I was talking to a bunch of people, and saw this software engineer who was working out of Europe, and was super inspired by her story," she said. "She was also a woman. I love to see other women in tech and also, she's European. I grew up in Belgium, so that's kind of my connecting point to her." A foot in the door While Doshi ended up getting a referral from the engineer in Europe, she said she wasn't initially thinking of asking for one. Reaching out because you're genuinely interested in someone's trajectory, she added, has twofold benefits — you're likely to learn more from a less stilted conversation, and the connection you make could last throughout your career. "I reached out to her to learn more about her story, not like, 'Hey, can I get a referral at Google?'" she said. "I actually didn't even have any intention of asking her for this internship referral, but we became friends and she let me into her life, which is what her day-to-day looks like, how she grows in the role that she's in." Remembering that professional connections, like any relationship, are two-way streets, also goes a long way towards helping them endure, Doshi added. "As we move and progress in our life, the way in which I think about it is, we are collecting people, and we are supporting people," she said. "And the people that will come all the way through will be the ones that you have formed a genuine bond with. If you ask someone for a referral and they give it to you, I mean, that's well and good, but five years down the line, 10 years down the line, they might not even remember who you are." If you can't get an internship, complete a project Since you're likely to be taking similar classes as your competition, it's what you do with that knowledge that can make you stand out, Doshi said. Projects are the "one thing that I will say again and again and again for any student," she said. The Google engineer partly credits her success in securing an internship to the projects she developed in her downtime. "This is the way you can set yourself apart from 1000 other people, because if you take data structures and algorithms, and your peers take data structures and algorithms, you all have the same foundational knowledge that you are building," she told BI. "But what you do with that knowledge, what you do with the data structures and algorithms, really, really makes a difference." There's no pressure to specialize in a niche skillset right out of the gate to impress potential employers, either, Doshi said. What you're really aiming for is a broad knowledge base and a flexible personality. "They don't expect you to come in with tons and tons of experience," she said. "They actually care about more — can you think in a specific way, and given a situation changes, are you able to adapt to that? More than doing like 700 LeetCode questions and getting those exactly right, I tried to do more problem solving in adaptive sense." Becoming a 'go-to' person If and when you finally do land an internship, the challenge then becomes securing a full-time return offer. In Doshi's case, she did her best to become integral to the teams she was placed on — being a point person for a particular issue can help you be more memorable, as well as slowly build a positive reputation with senior employees. "If they have a bug, and they trust you enough to be like, 'Oh, Aashna, you've done something like this before. Why don't you take this up?'" she said. "That is not just giving you work. It's, 'Oh, we trust you to take something like this up.' So being that person they can trust, being that go-to person, is an absolute game changer." Doshi also cautions interns against self-isolating. You're not expected to know everything, and shouldn't try to act like you do. "As an intern, you are coming in with, as everyone knows, less experience than the rest of the team. The intention is to show progress," she said, adding, "The key lies in asking the right questions. A lot of people say there are no wrong questions, etc, etc. Maybe there are no wrong questions, but there are questions that are better than others, in my opinion." Knowing how to ask for help can be just as important as knowing when — Doshi suggests presenting your questions in a way that shows you've attempted to solve the problem on your own first. "Do your due diligence before that, which means if you're stuck, ask the right person for help," she said. "I'm going to explain that I already tried to do X, Y, Z, and it didn't work. How do I move forward?" The goal of an internship is, after all, to absorb as much knowledge as possible. Try to avoid letting your fear of looking lost halt your progress, she added. "So this kind of framework really accelerated my learnings, because I wasn't wasting hours and hours on something that absolutely I didn't understand or didn't work," she said. "And while I wasn't spending those hours, I still did my due diligence, which is, do my research, look through the code base."
