[Student] International Student: 0 interviews after 150 applications : what am I doing wrong?
I'm a CS + Mechatronics Engineering student (3.75 GPA) from Turkey, currently on exchange at a US university. I'm on a J-1 visa with Academic Training, work authorized until March 2027 — no sponsorship needed for the internship period itself.
I'm targeting Summer 2026 SWE and ML internships. Willing to relocate anywhere in the US. I've applied to around 150 roles over the past few months — mix of large tech companies, mid-size startups, and ML-focused companies — and have gotten almost entirely silence or automated rejections with zero interviews.
My background is ML systems and C++. I built and deployed a full-stack ML app from scratch, have GPU optimization/quantization experience on university clusters, and completed a software dev internship. I'm specifically avoiding roles that require no future sponsorship since I know that's a blocker for some companies.
Not sure if the issue is my resume format, international student status getting filtered by ATS, the types of companies I'm targeting, or something else. Would really appreciate honest feedback — especially on whether the visa situation is visibly hurting me and if there's anything on the resume itself that's an immediate red flag.
Posted Feb 19, 2026, 10:22 PM UTC