Secured FT job immediately after post-grad internship

Just sharing my anecdote if it's useful for someone. I will say much of this is clearly just me getting lucky and having time to take advantage of little opportunities.

I graduated spring '25 with my BS in data science from a top public school on the east coast. Job market was really awful ofc, and I had no previous internship experiences (just on- campus research roles). That spring, the only place I got an offer from at was a local tech startup for a paid internship for just that summer. The role's title was only barely related to what I studied, and the work I was doing was very non-technical (like filling out Google docs). I realized a week into my internship that I barely had more than 30 minutes of work every day.

I used the first week of my internship to do quick coffee chats with people there who were in roles I was interested in (I recommend learning from early-career people first). I think 2nd or 3rd week in, I reached out to someone from an adjacent team to learn about what they do and then ask if I can help with something. Without giving too much away, I ended up spending the summer developing a very simply program that could help speed up one of their data analysis processes. I was also able to join weekly team meetings hosted by this adjacent team and share my work, which got a little more talk around it. It wasn't perfect, but the tools I used showed promise, if me (or someone) could spend a little more time improving it. The program had luckily gotten the attention of some other folks too when the interns all did a organization-wide final presentation. They reached out to talk to me about it before my internship ended.

I didn't get a "return offer", but during the last month of my internship a full time role opened up within this adjacent department (perfectly aligned to what I studied), which they all encouraged me to apply to. I've been working that role full time now.

My tip: if you have a lot of free time in your internship, work at a small/medium sized startup, and you're experienced in programming, consider offering to do a programming project for another team that maybe doesn't yet have the knowledge or time that you can offer. Again though, this is not fool-proof and maybe I had some luck involved. Always prioritize your mental health before taking on a heavier workload.