“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!
Turner Romey (BFA ’20 + BS in Computer Science ’20)
Software Development Engineer at Amazon (AWS – Prime Gaming)
Is this going to be your first job/internship?
I had one internship as a “Social Media Intern” at a small company before entering the Amazon SDE pipeline. At the end of my Super-Senior year I applied to be a part of Amazon’s Internship New Grad program. Because of my Game Design background, my Amazon internship was working for the Crown Channel and making small games for the show that Prime Gaming runs on Twitch. With hard work and some late hours, I was offered a full-time position within Prime Gaming where I now work on software that manages Amazon Prime account’s Twitch Subscription Credits and other Prime Benefits
How did you approach your search for a job/internship?
I created an excel spreadsheet and applied to every entry-level position at every company I could find. This excel spreadsheet is organized as: Company name; Job name; Salary; Location; application date; status of application; link to application/job page. This made is easier to keep track of what jobs were a success and what weren’t and allowed me to keep track of dates and timelines which are important!
Many companies will say “1-2 years of industry experience,” this is a lie and don’t even worry about it, just apply. I ended up having offers from Boeing (something to do with VR and simulations for pilots); Columbia University for a research role; and this Amazon internship. I decided the internship at Amazon was best for me and I went full-speed and committed myself to getting a full-time offer at the end of the internship.
What did you do to find positions you are interested in?
I looked at what skills I had learned from Game Design and how I could apply them to companies. I was interested in young teams in large companies as I like job stability but wanted to work on something unique and fast paced. Ultimately the companies choose me and I can’t choose the companies, I believe in applying to a large volume of positions and companies because probability of getting interviews is on your side!
What kinds of positions did you apply to?
Software Engineer, Data Scientist, Visual Artists/Design, Front End Developers
What materials did you submit as part of your application?
I had a resume that did not have very good previous job experience (the resume was the small Social Media Internship and then some swim coach stuff). To supplement that lack of job experience I talked up heavily my technical achievements in projects I had worked on. This is actually a great in as many Software Engineers (out of college) only have maybe a single, half-finished project to show. THE BFA PROGRAM GIVES YOU SO MANY PROJECTS TO SHOWCASE! Talk technical details about all of them in your resume. Companies like to see skills and recruiters aren’t engineers so they don’t even know what many of these tech things like “Unity” or “C#” mean.
I also had a cover letter where I talked about the direction I wanted my career to take me. I mentioned that I am deeply interested in developing video games and being a part of quick “sprint cycles,” used SCRUM in describing some of my projects, and added one paragraph at the end I tailored to each job specifically and tried to write how the formerly mentioned projects would help me succeed in that role.
Do you have any tips for preparing application materials?
It’s a slog, it’s horrible, it’s taxing and being rejected so much is toxic. But keep going! An Excel spreadsheet was super important for me to keep my head up and focus on the big picture! It’s a marathon not a race. I was initially rejected from my current employer and later in the rat-race I was reached out by the recruiter so anything can happen!
Tell us a bit about the application and interview process:
My tips are: practice STAR in relation to your projects & look at LeetCode.
Did you have to do any sort of skills test/project as part of your interview? What was it like?
I wrote up an email to a younger CS friend of mine who was struggling to find a job (see below). NYU kids seem to sell themselves short, many of my classmates were some of the smartest people I knew and I believe anyone at the Game Center can get gigs like mine!
1) Focus on your GPA, for engineers it is important! You don’t necessarily have to put your GPA on your resume, but many of the job apps required me to write my GPA or submit my transcripts. Every little point helps.
2) Apply to internships now! Many of the internships for next summer fill up by January so its important to be ahead of that game. Start with the larger companies and then hit every software company under the sun. Going to career fairs helps with this immensely to make sure you got your resume together and make a LINKEDIN! I got rejected from over a 100+ companies until Amazon decided to pick me up. It is extremely stressful and an unfortunate part of the grind 🙁 . NYU has resources like career development center that no one I knew ever seemed to use that help you with this. I’d encourage you to use it because half our tuition is paying for it. Be a regular and be kind so that at some point next year they actively know who you are and are rooting for you.
3) Find an active club (many are inactive, I don’t even know if my club is functional anymore lol), and engage in it like another class. Really put in the work so that you can possibly get a leadership spot in your final year. This is great resume filler if you don’t have work experience.
4) Complete a single major project and one or two side projects. (GAME DESIGN IS A SLAM DUNK HERE) This is important because part of applying to engineering positions is inevitably your portfolio. This is what Senior Project is supposed to help with, but by the time that class starts you are already in the works of finding a job and Senior Project more becomes an annoyance than anything helpful. Find a simple project to complete online and make it go live and have all the code commented on GitHub. Then do one or two more smaller projects. You do the smaller two in addition to the big one in order to add “volume” to your resume/portfolio. Many recruiters aren’t software engineers. They have no idea what stuff means. If you have a project that looks complex and seems cool but in reality was straightforward thats a great way to get through the first few filters of a company. It also shows you have self drive!
5) https://leetcode.com/ and https://app.codesignal.com/login are your guides for the interview process! Many people grind these questions and get crazy good at them (I wasn’t). After getting your foot in the door at a company, they will ask you to do a round of interviews. They WILL ask you these questions during those interviews, so make sure you understand them and can explain your way through it. Many people can fly through these questions and still not get an offer, that is because “they did not properly show their thought process.” I failed one of my coding interview rounds and still was able to move on to the next one. This was because I talked all about how I would do it if I knew the syntax (it was rough to say the least). But code reviewers are not there to test you, they are there to work with you. Every line of code you talk out loud about why you are writing it, even if it’s just “int x = 0.” Explain why you are making it! I’d practice these questions to a) make sure you know how to do it and can explain the runtimes and b) make sure you practice talking out-loud about what you are doing the entire time!
Did you hit any roadblocks during the job search?
I honestly believed at the end of my student career (in the midst of a pandemic) that I wouldn’t find a job. I had been rejected for months, fell apart with my classes, and was hurting from a whole bunch of stuff. I think I kept applying because at some point it made my parents happier than making me happy, and it wasn’t taxing after a while it sort of just became a habit to send out apps for 4-6 jobs a week. I randomly got some great offers and my whole world changed. Just keep going!
Where can people find your work?
I put my work on GitHub; I hope to spend more free time in the future and make an indie game!