so hey! been a long time since i last wrote something.
and i wasn't particularly busy in life, but to say the least it had been quite weird (still is)—not in a bad way, but its just weird
it was back in march when summer internship interviews were allocated, and i opted out bcs i genuinely believed i could land something better.
my first shot
i reached out to aryan that night and he agreed to give me the internship, however i insisted that i'd start in may, after exams were over, but the truth is—i was gonna go on a hunt to reach out to more people.
the big fish in the pond
my next prospect was apoorv, got on a call with him and he gave me the work right away, it was a data pipeline and told me to complete the first half of it as the second half required access to GPUs and LLMs which he was gonna provide. i speed-ran it in 2 days, but then things kinda started to fall off and almost a week later i was ghosted, and the next thing i know is that i'll have to find some other opportunity.
you're either prepared or f*cked
i fucked up real bad at my next interview, this was one of the most interesting startup building at the intersection of AI and web3, and i had broken knowledge of both the parallels, this was literally the worst interview i ever appeared for
just keep pushing
then i skimmed the WTFund portfolio and reached out to CTO of one of these startups, unfortunately they weren't hiring but the fact that they liked my profile was a big boost.
be embarrassing
then i did the most hilarious thing i could, i was scrolling through reels and stumbled upon this app that rewards you for social deeds (going to a beach clean up, book club, run club etc.) and i was like "damn! this is interesting"
i downloaded the app and it asked for a secret code?? went to their instagram profile, the bio mentioned "we're invite only". what do i do? i DM'd them asking for a secret code and got one! the app was good so what do i do?
lol, it was the founder himself who was chatting, he's a design freak and loved my portfolio. i got on a call with him and had a good discussion, unfortunately he wasn't really willing to hire for a 3 month commitment—which seemed like a cap bcs in the discussion itself i had made it clear that i wanted to work beyond internship period. hard luck ig.
nah i'd win
at this point it was april already and i was pretty much exhausted. On 5th april, i sent one more email to a startup which had gotten govt. grants (₹ ~75 Lakhs)
due to prelims and shit, the call got delayed till 14th april, i did total of 3 rounds of interviews with one take home assignment, which all lasted till last week of may. the last round was technical round, where mostly questions were regarding systems design, i am not really good at it but still managed to give half-baked correct answers. didn't get in anyways.
at this point, aryan had already hired a few interns, meaning i lost my slot—guess karma hit me back for swanging in all sides.
it was 8th of may, now my last resort was wne3, where i was already working and thats when miracle happened, i woke up in the evening from a nap and saw that i was added in a group chat by the founder i last interviewed with, it was me, the founder and his cousin, who wanted someone to help him build his idea.
full circle, kinda...
and thats how i got an internship this summer. crazy enough right? but you know what's weird? you prolly wouldnt be able to guess. its the fact that over the past 1 year i had been into web dev and after my last interview i realised general SWE roles are cracked now. standards have gone a bit too high.
so i need to specialise in a niche and that was web3, bcs i alr had web2 knowledge. now? i’m working with someone in crypto. and maybe soon—building ai agents for another crypto founder.
there was a feeling of uncertainty after appearing for each interview, whether i'd make it or not. i was fine for not accepting the allocated interview bcs i knew i can do better. but not getting what i dreamt of was hard to accept.
the curse of distinction
was i punished for being different? maybe not, it was just a test of my resilience, and i think i passed—bcs what i have now is probably the most exciting internship out there.
like a few months back i was tweaking web performance. now i’m running infra, building etl pipelines with llms, building AI tools, doing solo product engineering. how tf do things change so much in so less time? at the end, the curse of being different is just another reminder to do more cool shit and be more different.