Reality of an average college student trying to start their career. Part 2

Hi everyone, I’ll be picking up where we left off and talk about my experience with math research, the slog of applying for jobs, and the value of networking and how it helped me out immensely.

Math Research: Realizing when you’re out of your depth.

Picking up from where I left off, I want to talk about the first technical experience that actually had a profound effect on me.

At the start of my junior year, I contacted a professor in the applied math department about research. For context: I had taken a linear algebra class the semester prior and got absolutely cooked. However, realizing that linear algebra is the backbone of basically everything I wanted to pursue, I spent the summer hammering through a textbook to become well-versed. It worked, or so I thought, but I was still very much in over my head.

After a semester of prep, I joined a project with two other undergrads. The professor laid out the plan: we were working on algorithms for Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), specifically for streaming data.

The Gist: We wanted to find a way to calculate matrix factorizations using less computations to speed things up for “online” (real-time) methods.

On paper, this seems straightforward. In practice? This shit broke my brain. It took me 2–3 weeks just to wrap my head around the standard approaches. I felt like a guppy in a massive ocean, and the imposter syndrome kicked in at full force.

To be totally honest, for the first month, I had no clue what was going on. The other two undergrads seemed to get it, so I just kept nodding along, faking it until I made it. I made steady progress, but it was clear that the professor’s “favorite” was the one who would be supported in taking the paper all the way to publication.

Spoiler alert: It wasn’t me.

As the semester wrapped up, things fell apart. One student ghosted us to focus on graduation, and the professor and his grad student stopped reaching out to me. I take some responsibility. I wasn’t as proactive as I should have been due to other responsibilities. Recently, I checked the project page and saw that the “favorite” student pushed the paper to publication using the work the rest of us contributed. There are some hard feelings there, for sure, but it is what it is. You can’t win every battle.

This experience taught me that I actually knew very little about math. My passion for applying it grew, but the “research” side turned me off for a bit. I still want my Master’s (and maybe a PhD one day), but I learned there really are levels to this. I’m just trying to reach the next one.

The warzone that is applying to internships, new grad positions, and the value of networking.

Now that I’m done yapping about research, let’s talk about what every college student dreads: the job hunt. We’ve all been there, spamming resumes, refreshing LinkedIn every hour, hoping for even a rejection email just so you know a human or ATS system actually looked at your application.

I personally hate the “LinkedIn influencer” advice that says you should tailor a custom resume for every single job. Fuck that noise. Most of us are not going to be statistical outliers in this process anyway. I prefer to let the Law of Large Numbers work in my favor.

In my college career, I’ve applied to roughly ~1,300 internships and new grad positions. From that, I received maybe 80 total responses (OAs, HireVues, or recruiter calls). You can do the math; the response rate is abysmal.

Here’s the kicker: the first proper internship I ever landed wasn’t from a cold app. It was a referral from a friend’s dad who advocated for me to get past the initial screening.

Some people call that nepotism; I call it a mix of luck and networking. To me, networking isn’t just cold-messaging strangers on LinkedIn. It’s building meaningful relationships in school, clubs, and even just your friend group. Someone you meet in a lab might have a parent or relative willing to refer you. Those personal relationships are often the only way to get that “first push.”

That said, the “spray and pray” method still has merits. I have friends who blind-applied and landed FAANG roles. It’s all a gamble. For my current New Grad role (the one I’m heading to after graduation), I actually landed it through a straight cold application. But I only got the interview because I had those previous internships on my resume to talk about using the STAR method.

For next time.

For the next update in this series of posts, I’m gonna talk about what went down in my two internship experiences and how they led to my current situation and the opportunities I have now. Stay tuned for my next update. Thank you for reading.