Shashank  ·  May 2025  ·  Personal

I promised myself I wouldn't go home this summer.

On chasing internships, getting humbled by silence, and what nobody warns you about the gap between ambition and reality.

Hi. Shashank this side.

If you read my last post, you know I was that student — stuck in a loop, wanting to build something real, not knowing how to start. Well, here's the update. And it's not the kind I wanted to write.

A few months ago, I made a quiet promise to myself. And to my family. That this summer — my second year summer — I would not be sitting at home. I would have an internship. I would be somewhere, doing something, earning it.

Simple enough, right? I had a decent CGPA. I had projects. I had drive. What could go wrong?

Everything, apparently. But let me take you through it properly.

The bars I set, and the floor I found

I started with what felt like reasonable self-respect. No research internships where I'd just be fetching coffee for a PhD student. No unpaid gigs where I'd be handing over my time in exchange for a "great learning experience." Minimum stipend. Real work. That was the line.

JPMC had a program. The kind with a high CGPA cap — the kind that filters out most people before they even get a look. I was above the bar. I actually qualified on paper.

And then they sent OA links. Just not to me. I found out later that among all the qualifying candidates, they picked randomly. Not the top performers. Not the most interesting profiles. Randomly. I could laugh about it now. At the time, I just sat there staring at my laptop like it had personally betrayed me.

Okay. Fine. Move on.

Two hundred emails a day and a 1% reply rate

I pivoted to IIT research labs. Filled forms. Got rejected from every single one without so much as a "thank you for applying." Then I started cold emailing. Not casually — I mean systematically. Two hundred emails a day. Professors. Startup founders. Research labs. Anyone who might need someone who could actually build something.

1% replied. And of that 1%, most were polite no's or links to their website that I'd already visited. But a few were genuinely interested. One led to an interview — my first real technical interview for an internship. I was nervous in a way that I hadn't been nervous about anything in a long time.

The feedback they gave me afterwards has lived in my head rent-free since.

They were right. And I hated that they were right. I followed up. Multiple times. Still haven't heard back. That silence has its own particular sting — not the silence of rejection, but the silence of maybe, still pending, still possible, probably not.

The promise getting heavier by the week

Exams were coming. And with them, this dread that had started quietly in the background and was now very loud. Most of my friends — the ones in core branches — had already locked in PSU internships months ago. They had processes. They had pipelines. They had offers. I had 200 unanswered emails and a Google Sheet tracking my follow-up cadence like a small, sad CRM.

I lowered my bar again. IITs, NITs, DTU — cold emailing professors at those too. Startups. Early-stage companies. I told myself I'd do unpaid if it came to that. I told myself I'd pay for my own accommodation, my own travel, everything — just to be somewhere. Doing something. Not home.

The internship season has a cruel geography to it. Most things start the first week of May. And if you don't have something locked before exams, you enter this weird no-man's-land where you're studying for papers while simultaneously checking your inbox every twenty minutes for something that isn't coming.

That's where I was. That's where I still am, honestly, as I write this.

The people who said they'd help

There's a particular kind of hurt I haven't really talked about publicly, but I'm going to now because I think it's more common than anyone admits.

Some people — seniors, acquaintances, people who said the things people say — had told me not to worry. "Intern woh toh dila dunga, tension mat le, meri company mein hi kar lena." You know the lines. You've probably heard them too.

When I finally needed to hold them to those words, the calls stopped getting picked up. The messages got left on read. One situation even ended in a financial loss I'm not going to detail here, but which I definitely shouldn't have had to deal with on top of everything else.

I don't say this with bitterness. I say it because I think we need to stop pretending this doesn't happen. It does. Constantly. To students everywhere, every season.

Tomorrow is my exam and I haven't studied

I'm writing this the night before an exam. That probably tells you where my head is at right now. Everything I just wrote has been sitting in my chest for weeks, and I needed somewhere to put it before I could think about anything else.

I don't have a neat ending for this. I don't have the internship yet. I don't have the resolution. I'm just a second-year student who made a promise to himself and is watching the calendar with something between hope and dread.

But here's what I do know: I'm not the only one in this. If you're reading this and you're in the same loop — the cold emails, the silence, the friends who got placed through college processes while you're out here refreshing LinkedIn — you are not behind. You're not less. You're just in a part of the story that doesn't have a highlight reel yet.

And if you're from a hiring team and somehow ended up here — my inbox is genuinely open. No performing. No "reading a lesson." Just someone who wants to build something real, with people who are building something real.

If you're a student who's been through this — or still going through it — tell me your story. Maybe we figure something out together. Maybe we just talk about it. Either one feels like enough right now.

The story doesn't have an end yet. I'll write the next part when it does.

Shashank is a second-year student at RGIPT. He's been cold emailing since February, still hasn't given up, and is writing this the night before his exam.