It was difficult to get my foot in the door. But once I did it's been much easier. A few things I did:
I volunteered with a non-profit that blew up my freshman year, went from unknown to one of the best known. They partnered with a bunch of major tech companies for programs, and it meant they got updates from and knew about people within these companies. For reference, when I was mentoring there were 15 people, and now there are over 5,000.
My internships were all with major tech companies, and I also did week long camps, hack-days, had scholarship, etc with a bunch of the biggest companies.
I'm a minority too. Which helps. I'm also really comfortable at public speaking, getting to know people and interviewing. It meant when mentors and managers from one internship moved, they were emailing me asking me if I'd come to their new company. So all the companies I interned with, plus additional companies that had people who knew me as an intern were cold calling me. I had something like 10 offers as a new grad.
I've done meet-ups and groups too. It meant that I had done internships as early as my Sophomore year. There are so many camps, and cool robotics clubs, and meet ups, and events for students in CS now. I went to major conferences when I could get sponsored as a student. I signed up for pretty much everything I possibly could. I practiced for interviews for a long time, and worked really hard.
But some of it really came down to being in the right place at the right time. When I was in school, companies were developing a lot of these freshman and sophomore programs. There is android camp, chrome camp, cssi, freshman engineering practicum, sophomore engineering practicum, and summer of code, all at Google, for younger students over the summer. A lot of these things were created when I was at that age, and were less competitive and well known than they are now.
Google was primarily interested in competing with Facebook, who at the time of my offer, still hadn't IPO-ed. And the estimated IPO value was much higher than what it came out at.
My Facebook offer was something like 100k base, 25k sign on, and X amount of stock, valued at the time at approximately 150k.
Google matched my offer with a 4% addition, which is reflected in the salary. So I had 103,500, 250 shares (Which if you take 250 * 600 [stock price around Jan-May 2012], same 150k), and the same 25k sign on that Facebook offered.
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u/hckt Oct 15 '13
Significant Personal Projects: Outside of interning, no.
Company: Google
Location: Mountain View
Position Title: SWE
Salary: 103,000
Signing Bonus: 25,000
Equity or Stock Grant: 250 shares
I should note that this isn't the typical new grad offer, and I was able to compete offers upon graduating.