“I started applying in July and soon I had written 200 applications,” Oliver Wu, a computer science student at the University of Michigan, told Newsweek. alvarez via Getty Images
Landing a summer internship can sometimes prove to be an extremely difficult undertaking.
Oliver Wu, a student at the University of Michigan, says he applied to 456 internships.
The computer science student has received three offers and will intern at Ford this summer.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by an editor.
The computer science student Oliver Wu says he pulled out all the stops in his search for a summer internship. “456 applications, 56 interviews and zero hours of sleep in four months, all for an internship,” the University of Michigan student wrote in one TikTok-Postwhich he released on January 11th.
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Users have now viewed the post on the platform more than 2.9 million times. Compared to US magazine “NewsweekWu reported that he had applied before the start of the fall semester. “I started applying in July and soon I had 200 cover letters,” he said. Before the new academic year began, he added, he was writing 15 to 20 applications per day.
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Wu told Newsweek that he felt “burned out” by the lengthy search, during which he received “hundreds of rejections.” “The hardest part was staying positive and working hard,” Wu said. But he was undeterred and continued his search. “I didn’t want to regret that I could have tried harder. So I decided to do everything I could.”
The tech job market is weakening
Wu’s efforts eventually paid off. He received three offers and will complete an enterprise technology internship at Ford this summer. “I was in class at the time and I remember walking into the hallway and jumping up and down while quietly screaming with excitement for about 10 minutes,” Wu recalled to Newsweek.
Wu isn’t the only one struggling with the slowing tech job market. The industry-wide layoffs that began in late 2022 do not appear to have subsided yet. Tech companies have continued to lay off staff to clean up their operations.
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Last week, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, told employees that they would have to prepare for more layoffs this year. Pichai said it was about “removing layers to simplify execution and increase speed in some areas.” Wu did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular business hours.
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