From no internship to Zon ‘26 in a year (non-target, no referrals)

I wanted to post this because just 14 months ago from today, I was in the exact same shoes as the majority of people here: * I did **not have an internship for the summer.** * I had sent hundreds of applications without much luck * I was feeling extremely discouraged from the lack of success However, in the span of just one year: * I got **multiple** high quality offers (ended up accepting Zon for ‘26) * Passed over a dozen behavioral and technical interviews * I’m way more comfortable in interview loops now. This was all coming from a **non-target state school and without referrals**. **My strategy was simple:** * Get **something on your resume** (whether it be a club project or an unpaid internship) → you need something to talk about during the behavioral interviews, as well as passing the resume screens. More specifically, you need to map those experiences to the commonly asked questions and have STAR stories prepared. * You need to **get good at leetcode**. I know. Just a little over a year ago the idea of having to grind leetcode seemed extremely pointless and daunting, but this is simply the standard for FAANG and a lot of other good companies. Being good != solving 500+ problems, but it does require a solid foundation of the general patterns and problem types (it really is only around 15 core patterns) * **Practice practice practice**. I spent a lot of time doing mock interviews, both behavioral and technical, which mattered way more than I expected Here are some of the more concrete things I changed that actually moved the needle: **1. I stopped solving random problems and organized them by pattern.** Instead of just clicking whatever medium popped up, I grouped problems into buckets: arrays/hash maps → two pointers → sliding window → linked lists → stacks/queues → trees (DFS/BFS) → heaps → graphs → basic DP. Once I realized most interview questions are just slight twists on those patterns, it stopped feeling infinite and new problems felt more intuitive. **2. I started to verbalize constraints and write pseudo-code before writing code** Every single problem I would say things like: * “What’s the input size?” * “Can values be negative?” * “Are duplicates allowed?” * etc. And I would always write out the general structure of the solution, which meant I could ask the interviewer if I was on the right track. It sounds basic, but interviewers actually care about that. I used to skip this and jump straight into coding and then get stuck halfway through. **3. I practiced debugging out loud.** If you can’t explain why your output is off by one or why the indexing is wrong while talking through it, that’s a problem. A lot of interviews now feel closer to “reason through this messy thing” than textbook perfect solutions. **4. For behavioral, I stopped winging it.** I literally wrote out stories for: * a time I disagreed with someone * a time I messed something up * a time requirements were unclear * a time I had to rush something * etc. And I made sure each one had real technical detail, not just “we worked hard and succeeded.” The biggest shift for me was realizing interviewing isn’t about doing 500 problems. It’s about mastering the core patterns, thinking clearly under pressure, and actually practicing the skill of interviewing.