Don’t waste your summer by playing the lottery

I realized a few months ago that the reason I was getting ghosted by every single internship was not because my CV was lacking but because the system is literally broken. In 2026 if you are just one of 2,000 people hitting the easy apply button on a LinkedIn post for a major firm you are basically just donating your data to a database that a human will never look at. The filters are so aggressive now that you can have a perfect profile and still get deleted by a bot before anyone even knows you exist.

The only thing that actually changed my situation was stopping the mass applications and focusing on mid sized firms that do not have famous logos. These companies are usually growing fast enough to be desperate for help but they are not big enough to have a massive HR department gatekeeping every role. I realized that if I could get directly to a team lead or a department head I could skip the entire portal nightmare.

My new strategy has been finding the specific person I would be working for and sending a short direct email that is not about me but about them. Most of these managers are completely overwhelmed. Instead of asking for a career opportunity I just say I saw their team is handling a new project or expanding and I can jump in to handle the manual work or research to save them time. It turns the conversation from me asking for a favor into me offering to fix a headache for them.

The research/email writing part is the biggest grind because you have to actually know what the company is doing to not sound like a bot. A LinkedIn and Whali combo will find you contacts and pull their recent company news to write the emails do you.

Since I switched to this direct outreach I have had three interviews in the last two weeks alone. It is a completely different world when you are actually talking to a human being who has the power to hire you on the spot rather than waiting for a portal status to update.

If you are stuck getting rejected by the big names just stop for a second. Find the companies no one is talking about and reach out to the people in the trenches. It takes a bit more effort to do the outreach this way but at least you are not shouting into a void anymore.