Don't give up your job hunt

After a series of job rejection emails, I contact the company to ask why I’m not shortlisted for the job opening. They reply telling me they had received 1000 applications and could only select 10. Asking the question of why I didn’t make it was hard but I learned that it wasn’t me.

I have a tendency to try to figure things out on my own so I usually don’t approach people for help. I needed a job after graduation so I had to call companies. I compiled a list of 80 companies and recruitment agencies all over New Zealand in my industrial sector. Some companies said they had no vacancies, others encouraged me to keep trying. I was encouraged to undertake an unpaid internship and it worked.

I called EFT Solutions and two days later the company director called back with an internship opportunity  with the possibility of a permanent full time in the future. EFTS Solutions was my 56th call. 

I started with a two-month unpaid internship while continuing my work as a tutor.  My first week at work was terrifying. Even though I had enough experience working with the programming language (C), I constantly felt like a fraud because I didn’t do a full time computer science degree.  

I felt like I couldn’t cope with the scale of the project I would be working on. The biggest project I’ve worked on was about 8KB in size and now I was working on a source code of more than 30MB.  

I was too afraid of asking where to start. My boss helped me start because I couldn’t figure out where to dive in. I didn’t like asking him for help. After that, I would tell myself to fix the next issue on my own. It was a bad approach.  

I sat there in front of the monitor, scared because I thought I couldn’t do this.  I would have to go back home as a failure. After four hours of futile Google searches and reckless code tampering, I gave up and asked for help.

Everyone says the point of an internship is to learn. No one ever says how much there to learn. For me, everything was terrible and I didn’t know what I was doing for a lot of the time.

An example is that I make very tiny mistakes. Mistakes that are extremely hard for me to figure out when I am going over them again. I ask my colleague for reviews and BAM! There’s the problem.  

I am four months into my job and I don’t hesitate to ask for help anymore. Sure I would still try about 10 times before I call someone. I accept that I will not know everything so I will have to ask for help. This is the best lesson I will learn.

by AUT Master of Engineering graduate, Mayur Wadhwani who now works as a Junior Software Developer.