How bad is it to graduate with zero internships, but personal project experiences?
I am starting my final year in 12 days, and I'm starting to worry I'll graduate without a single internship on my resume. It's not for lack of trying I hope — I've applied to around 500 positions and landed only 2 interviews. Both went fine as far as I could tell, then I got ghosted on both.
What I do have is a stack of self-directed projects: a home security system built on AVR microcontrollers, a bigger version of which im currently working on with a couple of CS friends using multiple ESP32s talking to each other with a Raspberry Pi and push notifications, a genuinely weird PCB project where I'm 3D-printing wire channels into the board itself, and some other embedded/firmware work. I've put in a lot of hours debugging real problems, never inside a company.
I don't know how much that actually counts when a recruiter is skimming resumes though. A 500-to-2 ratio has me questioning whether the resume is even getting past the initial screen, and getting ghosted after two interviews that seemed to go okay is its own special kind of demoralizing. For reference I've been using the template over at r/EngineeringResumes
At this point I'm done grinding out applications for now and just focusing on finishing my degree. But I'd still like to know: if you graduated without an internship, how badly did it actually hurt down the line? Did having real projects soften the blow, or did it not really matter without a company name attached? And for anyone in the same boat — did you keep applying alongside coursework, or fully step back like I'm doing?