Most of my classmates had 2-3 internships by graduation. I had zero because I spent my summers working at a restaurant to pay tuition. I thought this would disqualify me from top companies.

What I did have was personal projects. I built a real-time transit tracker app for my city's bus system that actually got some users. It used WebSockets for live updates and had a React Native mobile app. I also contributed to two open source projects (a React component library and a Python web framework).

Apple's new grad process was: online assessment, phone screen, and then a virtual onsite with 4 rounds.

The online assessment was straightforward leetcode medium difficulty. Phone screen was a more difficult algorithm problem (backtracking). The onsite had 2 coding, 1 system design (simplified), and 1 behavioral.

For the system design round, they didn't expect the same depth as an experienced hire. They asked me to design a URL shortener. I kept it simple but covered the key aspects: hashing strategy, database choice, analytics, caching.

The behavioral round focused on teamwork and learning from mistakes. I talked about my open source contributions and a time when my transit app went down on launch day.

Got the offer and I've been at Apple for 8 months now. The team is amazing and I'm learning so much. Turns out, not having internships didn't matter at all. What matters is demonstrating that you can build things and solve problems.

Starting TC was 180k which is more than my parents combined income.

1. Personal projects can absolutely compensate for lack of internship experience.
2. Contribute to open source. It shows you can work with existing codebases.
3. New grad system design expectations are much lower. Focus on fundamentals.
4. Be genuine in behavioral interviews. Don't try to be someone you're not.
5. Apply widely and early. I applied to 200+ companies and heard back from maybe 15.