Landing and Losing My First Tech Job in College

On this post I’ll be sharing my experience of how I got and lost my first tech job as a software developer.

I still remember the day so vividly. It was a Monday morning, and I received a call from my sibling who works at a pharmaceutical company, They asked me if I was interested in a job as a programmer. I was ecstatic — it was my first ever tech job proposal. I immediately send in my resume, which contained all my recent achievements and side projects as a programmer. I was scheduled for an interview on Wednesday of the same week, and he interview would be conducted online via the Zoom app.

If I am being honest, I didn’t prepare at all. I didn’t do any research on the job or the company that was hiring, which I would not recommend anyone doing. I thought I was smart enough to just wing it.

It was Wednesday and the interview was to commence by 10am. To my surprise, I was being interviewed by a panel of five recruiters, all having different questions. Some had questions about the technical side of the job, while the human resource personnel were more concerned if I fit in with their work ethics. It was all overwhelming at first, getting asked questions and having to think on your feet.

It was then I figured out I was being interviewed for a role as a PHP developer — here’s the twist — I had no idea and I had never worked with PHP before in my entire career. It was just one thing after another. I had to convince the panel that even though I had no prior experience, I was still a best fit for the job. I sold them on all my other great skills like how I was a wiz with Java and object-oriented programming (OOP). And that was it — I got an email the following day that I passed the first stage of the interview, and I was to show up for a physical interview on Friday of the same week, where we would have to solve actual programming problems.

I got there very early in the morning to meet the competition I was the youngest and least experienced of the three of us who made it to the physical stage of the interview, I knew I had my work cut out for me, but I wasn’t discouraged. I went in there with a winner’s mindset so I didn’t let anyone or anything get in my way.

We were asked to design an application that registered a user and saved the data to a SQL database, and allows the user to login if the username and password matched. If it didn’t, it would hint on the incorrect user input and also check if the username already existed in the database, if it did, it would stop the user from registering twice. Everyone else used PHP for the simple application, but me, I used the Java programming language to create the simple application and once we were done, we were asked to leave so our code could be studied. Later that night, I got an email that I got the job. If I am being honest, I was more grateful to God than I was happy because all the odds were indeed stacked against me and I still got the job.

It was a wonderful experience for me, competing with fellow programmers for a paid job has to be the highlight of the year, but I am still a computer science major in my third year of college and the job required me to be on-site and couldn’t be done remotely, so that was how I got and lost my first tech job.

Conclusion

In my physical interview everything I have learnt so far was put to the test I was facing opponents who had 14 years more experience than me, but it didn’t matter I told myself this is the moment I have been waiting for this is my moment I was going to give myself a fighting chance I wasn’t just going to throw in the towel

Remember all it takes is just one moment to achieve everything you have ever dreamt of they say the key to success is for a man to be ready when his time comes. Seize your moment.