Wow

As many of you know the summer 25 internship is coming to an end. The vast majority of ppl who have an internship lined up have probably had it secured for a while now and the closer we approach the summer, the harder it is for ppl without an internship to land one. Anyway here's where I enter. Im a Junior cs major at a t50 school, with an average/slightly below average gpa, and no past internship experience apart from personal projects on my resume(nothing to write home about). I started seriously applying on jan 1st applying to maybe 5-10 places as daily as I could. a variety of roles too (frontend,backend, fullstack, ML, and data science) for the most part id get ghosted, receive an automated follow up email 3 weeks later saying they went with another candidate, or if I was lucky get a aysnchronous hackerank coding assessment in which id get ghosted after. I try tweaking my resume a bit, test out different formats and even fluffing up a bit of my projects in an attempt to get any response. Obviously this is a common experience for many ppl here but I keep at it all the way from then till now with maybe only getting 3 actual 1:1 interviews. At this point summer Is approaching and I have no idea what I can really do on my end. I hear on reddit,tiktok and pretty much everywhere that one of the best ways to get your foot in the door is through a referral however, I had none. I tried reaching out to recruiters, but I barely got a response this late in the cycle. Anyway I happen to stumble on one of my childhood friends linkdin page and see that he got a recommendation from the chief officer of the company he intered at the summer before so I hit him up and ask him about it. He encourages me to send him an email. So I find his company email and send him a connect request pretty much stating that I was a good friend of the person he gave the recommendation to and asking if their company was still accepting interns attaching my resume and if we could schedule a time to call. Within 2 days he replies saying that "any friend of (friends-name) is a friend of mine", that I had a solid mix of skills on my resume, and that he was going to check if there are any project/internship openings for me to do. Fast forward to the call, I did some quick prep on reviewing my resume and the company. He was a super nice guy, asked me some questions about my resume, what the job entails, and just overall a chill conversation abt who I was and my skills. i didn't have to do any leetcode style technical interview and I essentially bypassed the whole "traditional process in a sense". So yeah I knew connections were important within the work force and adult life but holy shit this was one of those eye opener moments cause I didn't realize how powerful it could be. TLDR: average cs student struggles to land an internship let alone even hear back from companies but uses an unrealized connection to bypass the "traditional" interview process and land the job