 Almost a year ago, I posted this video where I took you guys along for a day in my life as a software engineering intern at Amazon Web Services and I did a terrible job at addressing your comments. In today's video, I hope to lay all of your concerns to rest and give you guys a little peek into how I landed my Amazon internship. This video will be divided into three parts. First, I want to paint a picture of where I was in my college and programming journey when I applied for this internship. Next, I'll discuss the process of actually applying and finally, I'll walk through each step of the interview process and give you guys some advice. Before I get into it, though, I want to say a quick thank you for all the love and support on the past two videos. It's been a while since I've seen numbers like that on my channel. I'm excited to keep that momentum going with this video and I know that you all will will run up the numbers, right? Oh, and for those of you that are new, my name is Josh Beasley. I'm a recent graduate from Yale University where I studied computer science. Now I'm active duty military, live out in LA. I make videos about college tech and anything else I'm interested in. All I ask of my new viewers is to watch this video and if you gain anything from it at all, consider subscribing. Oh, and just to disclaimer, I'm not some all-knowing force when it comes to software engineering applications. I can only speak to my personal experience, so hopefully that'll be helpful to you guys in this video. Alright, so where was I at when I applied for this internship? I applied to Amazon and all the other tech companies that I was looking at the fall of my junior year of college. At that point I had taken an introductory CS class, a functional programming class, a data structure class, an algorithms class, and a discrete math class. So I was pretty, pretty prepared. Now a lot of people will tell you that you won't even have a chance when it comes to coding interview questions if you haven't taken your school's data structures and algorithms classes and I believe that that's blatantly false. I had had successful coding interviews my sophomore year without ever being explicitly exposed to those concepts. Unfortunately for you, there are countless resources online to learn this material, especially on YouTube. Now don't get me wrong, formal coursework in data structure and algorithms definitely won't hurt but it's by no means a requirement. With some basic coding experience, a lot of self-study and many, many elite code questions, I think anyone can make themselves competitive within the coding interview process and software engineering applications in general. I would love to make a video purely focused around interview prep so let me know if that's something you'd like in the comments down below. Also I want to make it clear that at this point in my college grade I've also not done any previous software engineering internships. My internship at Amazon was my first foray into that field. Now that we've set the scene let's talk about actually applying for a software engineering internship. So you feel like you've done enough coursework and enough self-study and you're finally ready to actually you know put your application in, drop your name in the hat, what's next? Let's kick that answer off with actually talking about the timeline a little bit first. In order to be most competitive for some of these positions I really recommend you know putting your application in as early as you can in the fall because spots are going to start filling up and the earlier you get your application in the more likely you are to actually stack one of those spots. For me sophomore junior year I try to have all of my applications in by the end of September and at the latest like October because most of the phone screenings and interviews for me were happening around November and early December. Now these internship applications really don't take that long to fill out especially if you're prepared with a current copy of your resume and a template cover letter that can be you know adjusted for whatever specific company you're applying to. In general they just kind of ask you the same basic information have you submit those documents and then sometimes some companies will have some short answer like essay style questions but that's definitely not the norm. You can easily apply to 10, 15 companies in a night if you put a couple hours of hard work in. Now how do you begin building this list of companies to actually apply to for a sophomore junior year internship? Well I will be upfront and say both my sophomore junior year I apply to around 30 companies. Back when I was in college there's this great website called intern.supply and I don't know if it's still maintained as much anymore but it could still serve as a resource but it basically listed every single company that had software engineering internships and like a direct link to their application. That might be a good place to start but you can also check websites such as like blastor or indeed they normally have their internship positions listed on there as well but I believe the best resource when it comes to finding jobs is actually the classmates at your college in the years above you. Please please please use them as a resource ask them where they worked, how their experience was, whether they liked it or not and these don't even have to be classmates that you actively talk to on a daily basis. These can be you know acquaintances or they can be people that you just hit up on LinkedIn. There's many times that I was hit up from random people that I'd only brushed into once or twice before on my LinkedIn to get help with interview process. Also please hit up your classmates for referrals if they worked at a company that you want to work at they will most likely have a couple names that they can put in the hat that will get a little extra attention when the application cycle comes through the next year so please please please ask for referrals they will greatly increase your chance of actually getting your resume pushed through and getting that first interview. So now we've talked about my prior experience actually applying let's move into the interview process itself. Out of the 30-ish companies that I applied to I normally only heard back from about five or six and that that at least for me and my friends was pretty normal. Without a really really appealing resume or a referral it's hard to get a first round interview or a phone screening or even a coding challenge when you're just cold applying to these companies. In terms of this interview process that I keep mentioning for the majority of tech companies it breaks down into four main steps. First you have a coding challenge which is an automated you know hacker rank or you know you're presented a problem you have a box and a time limit where you write code to solve that problem. If you do well in that the next step is normally phone screening where they're going to ask you about some of your projects more behavioral type questions. If you do get on the phone screening then normally you'll move to a remote interview over the phone and like on a shared google doc or something depending on what company you're interviewing for where they're going to ask you coding questions and lastly is an on-site interview where they actually will you know fly you out to the site where you will be working and you'll get to meet some prospective members of the team interview with them and see if you're a good fit. The important thing that I've kind of realized is a lot of people get caught up on their resume and their applications but it seems like the resume is really only the first step in kind of deciding whether you actually get that coding challenge or not and once you get that coding challenge so with software jobs especially it seems like they're very focused on technical competency and yeah they'll ask you some behavioral questions along the line but the big focus is can you code can you solve these problems once you're actually given that first initial chance. Also I know I talked about this four-step process but it's by no means a strict process. Amazons was actually a lot different. Amazon's first round was a debugging challenge where you had to debug like 10 programs in 30 minutes and then they sent you like a logic challenge which was just a bunch of logic questions. If you did well in that then they sent you the actual coding challenge which was two questions and I remember that being pretty difficult but if you did well in that you had like an Amazon day in the life thing where they set up this like mock Amazon terminal and you had to like answer emails and look at code snippets it was kind of strange but once all of that was done then finally I had a final phone interview they actually didn't send me on site but it was just a phone interview where they asked me a bunch of behavioral questions and then two main coding questions and the hardest part about these interviews overall is just not knowing what you're going to get. There are so many little areas to study when it comes to these coding interviews when it comes to data structures or niche algorithms and you don't know how hard of a question you're going to get so it really is kind of look at the draw in some ways when it comes to you logging on to that call or going to that on-site interview and seeing what type of problem they give you like for my final Amazon phone interview we didn't even end up coding up the second quote coding question that they gave me we were running out of time so I just gave him an answer in pseudocode and we called it good and like I said I want to make a full video about this but when it comes to prepping for these coding interviews the best way that you deal with that uncertainty is you do as many problems as you can whether these be problems out of a book like crack and decoding interview problems on leak code hacker rank there's plenty of websites that have interview prep and you need to get to the point where your interviewer is halfway through describing the question and you immediately know what like archetype of question it is oh it's a two-pointer problem or oh like this is a linkless problem or oh this is you know DFS BFS that sort of thing once you get to that point you know you're kind of preparing but I look forward to kind of you know delving in that topic deeper hopefully in future videos and with that about a week after I finished my final phone interview with Amazon I was emailed an offer letter so that's my story that's how I got a software engineering internship at Amazon web services the summer after my junior year of college if you made it this far um try to sneak the word Bezos into the comments down below that should be interesting as a reminder my instagram dms are always open for any personal questions or if you just want to say hi so give me a follow over there after you subscribe here and with that drop a like down below it helps me and support the channel a lot more than you think and I'll see you next time