Internships and Careers

Earn credit toward your degree

If you have lined up an internship and would like to earn academic credit, read Internships for Credit to determine if you’re eligible and the steps you need to take to register BEFORE the start of the quarter.

Find internship or job opportunities

A wide variety of resources are available:

• Keep an updated profile on sites like LinkedIn, Indeed and Glassdoor to make it easy for recruiters to match you with potential jobs and contact you. They list thousands of engineering and tech job postings across the country.
• Professional organizations like ACM and IEEE maintain job posting sites.
• Check the employment pages of companies you're interest in.

Connect with employers at UWT and closer to home:

• Set up an account and profile on Handshake to search for job opportunities and engage with prospective employers.
• Look for opportunities sent through the undergrad mailing lists. 
• Attend the autumn and spring STEM career fairs hosted by UWT Career Development and Education.
• Participate in employer info sessions, hackathons, and career prep events to network with company representatives.
• Talk with SET faculty about your interests. Many faculty partner with industry on research or projects and may be able to help you make a connection.
• Attend the quarterly "Life After Graduation" session to discuss next steps into careers or graduate school. 

UWT students are often welcome to attend job fairs at the UW Seattle campus:

• Autumn SEBA event
• UW College of Engineering Career Events

Green River College's IT Connect is available to the public and advertises local tech and engineering internship opportunities.

Get help with your resume

Employers don't expect students and new grads to have an extensive work history, but they will look to your technical resume to determine if you could be a good fit for a position.

Your resume should emphasize your technical skills, projects, leadership, and accomplishments. Technical resumes are different from standard chronological or functional resumes. If you’re new to resume and cover letter writing, you can find many examples and tips for getting started online. Look at Professor Mike McCourt's Resume Writing for Engineers video to get started.

Once you have a draft, it’s a good idea to have people with experience take a look and give you feedback.

• Make an appointment with a career coach at UWT Career Development.
• Ask a SET advisor to take a look during an appointment.
• Drop by the Industry Partnerships at SET office with a copy of your resume.
• Watch for career events, including resume writing workshops, hosted by SET or UWT Career Development.

Highlight your work with a GitHub profile

You may also find that a prospective employer will ask about or be interested in seeing your GitHub profile. Generally, it's not required that you have one, but it can be a really good way to further highlight personal projects or significant contributions to open source. When talking about a project during an interview, you can point to your GitHub profile as a place for interviewers to learn more and see an example of your work. 

Prepare for an interview

The key to success in interviewing is practice, practice, practice. The coaches at Career Development can help you practice for the behavioral questions you may encounter, but you'll also need to understand what to expect from a technical interview and prepare as much as possible.

If you know someone who works at the company or who has interviewed there before, ask for insight on what the interviewing process is like. You can find many coding practice questions online.

Some SET students have found the book Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell indispensible in their preparation. If you can participate in mock technical interviews, do it. Experience will help you grow into a skilled interviewee. 

Keep in mind that employers are just as interested (if not more) in your approach and thought process to problem solving as the actual solution you come up with to a challenging coding question. You'll want to get comfortable verbalizing and using tools, like whiteboards, to demonstrate how you think and work toward solutions to problems. 

Get additional career prep advice

Kim Nguyen, Career Coach for undergrads at the Paul G. Allen School Career Development team at UW Seattle, created an incredibly helpful career guide for students. Kim is a UW alum who spent several years at Microsoft as an engineer and then as a recruiter. Clear and concise, this guide is packed full of great info and resources, including presentation slides that cover recruiting basics, crafting your story, and preparing for the tech interview.