This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Fiona Li, a director of marketing at an AI startup. Li graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 2023. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Loading audio narration…
My mom raised me as a single parent, and I didn’t want her to pay for school. I did have financial aid, but it only covers so much of the rent.
I wanted to save money and also attend school, so I looked to scale my career.
I consistently compared myself to students from other top schools. I knew that if I wanted to stand out as a candidate, I needed internship experience — especially because I was a communications major, which isn’t seen as a very strong credential.
In university, I completed eight paid and two unpaid internships. The other two unpaid internships were during the transition to college. I did so many internships to learn and increase my chances of getting a great job after college.
Interning through college
I wanted to get more experience at big companies. A lot of students know Google, Meta, all these big companies, but UC Davis is a non-target school.
I didn’t have much experience in my freshman year, but I applied to different unpaid internships on Indeed. I put my high school experience — boba shop, piano teacher, dance teacher — and the skills it developed into the application.
An internship at an e-commerce store helped me learn Facebook ads and digital marketing. That allowed me to apply to other unpaid roles.
Eventually, my résumé was full of unpaid internships, but companies didn’t know that because I didn’t state whether they were paid or unpaid. That helped me land my first paid internship at DocuSign in 2021. After that, one led to another — Intel, Nvidia, and more.
As a result, my grades weren’t the best. I had a 3.1 GPA. It was a tough trade-off. I had to decide whether to do worse in internships or get lower grades.
I thought about whether I wanted to pursue an MBA or a master’s degree. If I did, I would have focused more on grades. But at that time, building my career felt more important, so I don’t regret it.
At some point, I needed to get paid for my knowledge
I wanted to pivot from an unpaid internship because there’s a point where you stop learning and you’re just doing free work.
I wanted to keep learning. That’s when I’d move to the next internship.
When you do a lot of unpaid work, you don’t feel incentivized. At some point, you realize you need to get paid for the knowledge you have.
If the internship offers a lot of opportunities — for example, if I didn’t have any experience — I would still take an unpaid internship over a paid one. It’s more of a stepping stone.
When you’re very early in your career, the most important thing is learning, not money.
I don’t think the number of internships matters most. What matters is showing what you did during them.
I did feel a bit self-conscious at the beginning. Some of my peers joked that I was moving internships every three months.
But internships are usually short — around three to six months — so even if I wanted to stay longer, I couldn’t.
I also wanted to experience as much as I could. My goal wasn’t to get a return offer as I was still early in my college years. My goal was to learn, make an impact, and build strong relationships with my managers so that I could return if I wanted to.
Rejection and persistence
It took a lot of rejection to get an internship at Nvidia. I applied 13 times.
The first time I interviewed, I was a freshman with only unpaid internships, so my project wasn’t very impactful.
I got rejected for the initial role, but that manager passed my résumé to another team, and that’s how I got the internship offer.
A lot of students wait until their junior or senior year and then start panicking. Opportunities don’t come to you — you have to hunt them down. Reach out, cold email, network, and do everything you can to stand out.
Try both startups and big companies. During college, aim for four to five meaningful experiences so you have options. Complete at least one internship each summer to produce something impactful for your portfolio.
Do you have a story to share about a tech career? Contact this reporter at [email protected].
