I would like to share my short story on how I landed my first Job as a Front-End Developer.
A little background about my education: I was always interested in the tech since I was in school and learned C++ during last years of school. I finished my schooling in 2014 and got admission in an average Private engineering college. During first 2 years of my college, I didn't focus on learning much except a 2 months training in Java. However, I had a good understanding of core concepts of programming.
In the third year, I decided to learn web development. After taking few short courses on HTML and CSS I started "The web Developer Bootcamp" by Colt Steele. It was such a nice course that made my interest in Web development. I learned about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, NodeJS, ExpressJS etc. After that, I took few more courses on Angular and Java.
At the end of my third year, I applied for a number of Internships but didn't get selected for any. But I still kept applying.
During the final year of my college, I appeared for a few interviews for internship, I got rejected in most of them initially, but after a few months, I started getting positive feedback and finally cleared 3 interviews for unpaid internships. But I needed some monetary rewards as well to keep myself motivated and during one of the interviews, after I cleared all the rounds, the HR told me that I won't get any stipend as I was from a tier 3 college. That hit me very hard so I decided to move to NCR, a place with better opportunities. I appeared for 4 interviews on a single day, failed in 3 but cleared the last one. It was in a small startup for a profile of Web Developer Intern with a some stipend as well.
The internship started in February. In the initial 2 weeks, I learned about some Java frameworks like Struts, Spring & Hibernate and then Angular. I worked on a few bug fixes and enhancements in a Big Enterprise Java Application. Most of the work was repetitive and kind of boring, so I kept looking for better opportunities.
After a few more failed interviews, I cleared an interview for a front-end developer intern profile at another startup with almost double stipend and ReactJs as the main technology. I left the previous company and joined the new one.
In the new company, I learned ReactJs and started working on a project. Finally, after 2 months, I got a PPO and got a full-time Front-End Developer role with a good enough salary package according to my skills and experience. I am happy with my current Job and a lot more is left to achieve.
Latest comments (6)
Your story sounds a lot like mine but I'm still in the "not so good" private university. Although in my first year I got familiar with react and django and have been freelancing consistently since then!
That's really great! I wish I had started learning web development in the first year itself.
Well, its a plus point for you and you'll get a much better job once you complete your graduation.
I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing but i don't care where I work or how much I get paid I just want to be part of something which is going to be beneficial for everyone to use. Like even in my college we keep hosting workshops and build applications to make campus life easier
That's great.
Congrats rajesh
Thanks