“You Got The Gig” is a Q&A style interview with students and alumni about their job hunt strategies. If you’re a student or alumni who’d like to contribute your own tips & experience, email Toni for more info!
Nate Smith (BFA ’22)
UI Programming Intern (Fortnite) at Epic Games
Is this your first job/internship?
No, but this will be my first paid internship. I had an internship last summer working at Impeller Studios on their game In the Black, but that was very informal. However, It did give me some excellent additions to my portfolio.
How did you approach your search for a job/internship?
I tend to be a bit unorthodox with my job searches. This year I went to https://gamejobhunter.com/ to look at every city in the US (Last year I just looked at NYC and Boston) and clicked on every company I had heard of that I would be interested in working for to see if they offered internships. If they did, I added them to a list of positions to apply for. If they didn’t, I would send them a cold-email very briefly explaining who I am and asking them if they had internships I could apply for, or if they had ever wanted to try having an intern. I also searched LinkedIn, Google, and a couple other websites and wrote down everything I’d be interested in.
This cold-email step is really important if you have no experience in the industry. Capitalism is cruel, and “entry-level” positions usually require work experience, or at least will prefer you over other applicants if you have work experience. Getting an internship through cold emails can be time-consuming, and there’s a much lower response rate than applying to actual jobs. Last year, I sent emails to around 80 companies in NYC and Boston, and I got 13 replies, 7 companies that were interested, and 3 offered me a position. That being said, I only wrote 1 good cold-email to copy-and-paste and changed the names. Also, you are very unlikely to get paid. However, you likely only need to do an interview where they just ask you about some experience you have and make sure you’re not going to be a hindrance to the team. These internships tend to have a lot less guidance and you tend to get a lot less training, but they’re invaluable for getting something solid on your resume.
What kinds of positions did you apply to, and how many places did you apply to before getting this position?
I’m lucky in that I have a specialization that really narrows down the number of positions I can apply to, so I only looked for gameplay, UI, and generalist programming jobs, not graphics or networking programming jobs. I applied to something like 8 positions at Epic, and around 5-6 other places as well, but Epic was the first to get back to me.
What materials did you submit as part of your application?
My resume, a good portfolio, and a cover letter.
Do you have any tips for preparing application materials?
A good portfolio is a MUST. Seriously, I cannot stress this enough. Don’t have a welcome page, just drop the user directly into seeing screenshots/thumbnails (NOT logos) of your best projects, preferably laid out on 1 page. I recently redid my portfolio for this round of applications and based it off of the excellent website of Nina Demirjian, a fantastic example of a great portfolio. You are an art student, so having an interesting and pretty website does a lot to distinguish you from other applicants. If you are a programmer I highly recommend coding your own website. If you’re going this route, find one good way to display your games and stick to it so you’re not constantly bogged down in CSS. Also, make sure your website looks good on mobile. This is both harder (css can be annoying) and also simpler (you usually can just make a part of your css to say “if mobile, use this css instead of that css”) than it sounds. Always put your best work forward. If you are a programmer, show off your hardest programming project and explain what was cool about it. Having most things in one page is definitely a plus. If you can get gifs/videos of your projects that’s even better. Always always always get good screenshots and gifs of cool things you’ve made, and display them prominently with a link to the itch.io page. WebGL games are MUCH more likely to be seen by a recruiter than anything you need to download. Artstation other 3d models are good too if that’s your field. Likely a recruiter won’t actually play your games, so good screenshots and videos go a long way.
You can check out my portfolio at www.nwlsmith.com 🙂
You’re a design student going to art school! Make a cool resume! BUUUUTTT (and this is a big but), you need to make sure your resume is readable by bots. Most companies use AI services to read your resume, so if it’s hard to read because you made it in illustrator, no matter how cool it looks, many AI programs will just think it’s junk. Case in point is my resume. I got lucky and had a human read my resume at Epic Games, but this isn’t always going to happen.
Cover letters suck, but if you’re applying to similar positions you can get away with having a template where you change out sentences based on the keywords they’re using. Do they mention they want Python experience? Mention that project you did in Python. Always talk about being a good communicator with examples; especially for programming, since most programmers suck at talking to people (myself included), this is very important. Always always always run your cover letters by some people at the career center.
Tell us a bit about the application and interview process:
First I got an email saying they were interested in me. Then they gave me a take-home coding test which consisted of 4 questions. All of the answers were easily found online, but don’t rely on that. Try to come up with your own answers. Then a 15 minute interview where you basically say why you’re interested in the job (Do research about the company. I knew about the Epic Games Store and the Apple V Epic lawsuit and how they try to give more money to creators. They love that you know that kind of stuff, and you can use that to say something like how you want to work for a company that “holds the same values as you”). Next they had a 45 minute technical interview, although these can be as long as an hour and a half. Then there was a tiny discussion after that and I got the internship :). After quarantine is over this process will likely be a bit more involved, but for an internship the process is not as involved as it is for an actual job.
Did you have to do any sort of skills test/project as part of your interview? What was it like?
YES. Ugh. Tests are really only a thing for programmers, but this is the thing I feared the most. Programming tests are terrifying, but they are manageable if you know what you’re going to be quizzed on. Mostly you’ll be tested on some basic CS knowledge on data structures, and then some language specific knowledge. You’ll also be asked to design a system or solve a problem, and these are the most manageable if you ask a lot of questions and take your time thinking things through. There are a lot of resources out there to help with this.
What advice do you have for other students looking for a job/internship?
Apply early (but any time before April is usually okay) and learn to dial your strengths up to 100. If your portfolio isn’t amazing, learn what recruiters look for (certain skills/applications/art styles for artists, certain programming challenges for programmers). Learn what recruiters are impressed by and try to incorporate that into your next major studio project. I learned that programmers, designers, and artists LOVE people who make tools that make their jobs easier, so in your next project, if it’s a deck-building game, try using ScriptableObjects to make card creation super simple. Take on programming challenges in your projects, and show that to recruiters in your resume, portfolio, and cover letter. I also learned that programmers hate making UI, so I volunteered to work on UI tasks that programmers didn’t want to do, which made me a more attractive hire.
You go to the Game Center. You have an incredible opportunity to build an awesome portfolio without the high-stakes of being a professional game developer. Definitely take advantage of it.
All of this being said, programmers have it pretty easy when applying and also in the industry in general. Learn to leverage your strengths, and ask for help when you need it.
Where can people find your work?
www.nwlsmith.com