It was a long and brutal struggle, and I still get shivers thinking about the rejections—but in this video I break down exactly how I landed my first software engineering internship at Google. I started college not knowing how to code while people around me were already grinding Codeforces. So I went all-in: 6–8 hours a day on C++, DSA, and competitive programming. It was compile errors and wrong answers at first (even on easy problems), but I stuck with it—GeeksforGeeks for DSA fundamentals, then consistent practice till I hit Specialist on Codeforces. Once I realized DSA alone wasn’t enough, I fixed my resume by building real projects (this was pre-GPT era, so I built everything from scratch): a Flappy Bird web app, a blockchain-style DScoin course project, and my personal website. Later I used Educative for web dev and system design, and built more structured apps like a PDF chat-style project. I also added ML basics by completing Andrew Ng’s ML course and implementing simple regression/classification projects. The biggest differentiator for me was mock interviews (TopMate helped a lot) and getting my work in front of humans—especially referrals. A kind senior referred me, and that’s what unlocked the Google opportunity. I also share salary context (₹1 lakh/month) and the exact system I followed so you can replicate it for your first internship.