<p>I am a ChemE major at a top 10 institute unable to get an internship at many firms. Ive applied to over 200 companies and only 4 have called me for an interview. Can anyone tell me if a 3.3+ GPA is really bad or is it my resume?</p>
<p>I have the same problem… I applied to approximately 60 positions at approximately 50 different companies, had 2 interviews, no offers. I’m not posting in your thread to offer advice because I’m clearly not the right person to be offering it, but I think this isn’t that uncommon. I don’t know about ChemE or what classes you’ve taken, but personally I feel that I’m still pretty useless to anybody as an engineer. Hopefully in a year the situation will be different.</p>
<p>I am sure you are not the only one, and furthermore, there are many competitions. I am sure even PhDs are competing.</p>
<p>What year are you?</p>
<p>Rising Junior…</p>
<p>By applying to so many companies it seems you are using the strategy of quantity over quality.
Are you tailoring your resume to best highlight your skills and qualifications that are required/desired in the job description?
Are you just using one generic resume for each company?
You’ve had four interviews, how have they gone? Are they awkward and uncomfortable? Are you ill prepared.</p>
<p>I’ve gone to a couple of resume writing and interviewing seminars on campus and they have been very helpful. Check you career services center because they will generally have a good feel for what the companies in your area are looking for in potential interns.</p>
<p>UChopeful2010 gave some really good advice. You have applied to so many positions but if you are just dumping the same resume into all of them, then they have all likely just seen it as a generic resume without anything connecting it to their job or company. You need to tailor it. You also need to make sure you have it written so that it highlights the proper things. Go to your career center and have them critique it. Their insight will be much better than most of us on here, and they will be able to talk with you in person and look at your resume with you rather than us having to guess.</p>
<p>The other thing is that with interviews, you need to be a good interviewee (obviously). It may be worthwhile to go to mock interview sessions that your career center holds (if they do) so you can get critiqued on what you need to work on. If you have had 4 interviews with no offers, it sounds to me like you may be a somewhat poor interviewee. Once you get there, it is all about interpersonal skills. Your resume gets you the interview; your personality gets you the job.</p>
<p>Finally, you may want to try getting a job in a lab on campus in the meantime just to add relevant experience to your resume. Since you don’t have a job (and haven’t had one), that is going to hurt you if you aren’t proactive about it. See if any professors need a lab assistant for the summer/upcoming semesters. That won’t be quite as attractive to employers as an internship, but it won’t be far off and will be infinitely better than working at Whataburger or HEB.</p>
<p>4 interviews out of 200 online resume dumps is actually pretty good. A lot of the time (not always), the online applications for jobs are largely useless.</p>
<p>Have you tried applying for anything through your school’s career website? That usually works a bit better.</p>
<p>How did your interviews go?</p>
<p>If you’re not doing all of this through your schools career services dept., then you are mostly wasting your time.</p>
<p>How are your classmates doing? It would be good to get a sense of whether its something more general like the economy, or something that might be more under your control, like your resume. </p>
<p>It might also be you are still too junior. I know at Waterloo (in Canada), freshman students are currently having problems with getting coop assignments, but students in all the other years have a combined success rate of over 90%.</p>
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<p>Really? Others were telling me the opposite.</p>
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No… the fact that a job is available through your school’s career services department means that the company is specifically recruiting for that particular job at that moment from your school.</p>
<p>Online applications are available to anyone, anytime, anywhere, so they are much less likely to be looked at.</p>
<p>The economy sucks and there’s 80 zillion people looking for jobs. Engineering is not immune to national trends.</p>
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<p>But then it’s very easy to apply for it, all you have to do is log in and say “apply.” So everyone applies for it, and they make the same posting at a handful of other schools. After all that they’ve got hundreds of applications for 1 position. Also, atleast at my school, these mostly just want rising seniors. </p>
<p>A lot of people won’t bother applying through the company’s website.</p>
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I beg to differ.</p>
<p>“A lot of people won’t bother applying through the company’s website.”</p>
<p>That’s how I got my internship, and I didn’t get one response from any that I applied through my school’s career center.</p>
<p>Your experience is not typical elevateme. Many more students get their jobs through career services than they do on the company website. It is generally like a 3/1 ratio.</p>
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<p>At least at my school, for rising juniors (which means between sophomore and junior year), this is undoubtedly false.</p>
<p>It is not “undoubtedly false” just because you haven’t experienced it. In order for it to be false, it means your career services department must be pretty terrible. At my undergrad school, far and away the majority of internships were got through the career fairs, which were run by the career services department. Often they made you apply to their company website but the actual decision to offer an interview was made on the spot in-person most of the time; that in-person meeting is facilitated by career services. For the most part, the job boards for the university were supplemental to the career fairs.</p>
<p>So you guys are saying that I should cater a resume for each job i’m interested in?
Would someone want to take a look at my resume and give me some feedback?</p>