I would say by now that my first ever internship search is over. I managed to get an Amazon offer! For reference, my school reports around 10 freshmen get the same each year.
I started my search over the summer before college. It turns out big quant companies were already opening applications for the next summer.
Just being a freshman is a huge black mark on any application, since anyone who prioritizes engineering capability would just take an upperclassman from your school instead. There’s a trick where you report your graduation year as that of a 3-year graduation, so a recruiter who isn’t attentive might confuse you for a sophomore. I tried this a few times but didn’t have any success.
Around January I still had no interviews and started getting desparate. I applied to anything and everything I could find on LinkedIn/Handshake. I believe that was a massive waste of my time. Sometimes you forget the point of an internship. Do you actually gain meaningful experience working minimum wage at a no name company, just to write some Python or operate a website? I’d much rather just stay home and work on a cool personal project, or stay at the University to do research. Much more fun, and looks better on a resume anyways.
There’s a problem of keeping up to date with new opportunities, especially openings from big companies, as it appears to be somewhat important you apply as early as possible. For that, I just follow this person on Instagram called zero2sudo who posts updates for basically everything. It’s very useful and anxiety-reducing to just have one Instagram account to check for everything.
For this cycle I submitted around 200 applications total? I stopped counting around 100. I slowed down a lot after realizing how meaningless and demeaning spam applying was. I got a handful of OAs, which I aced thanks to previous competitive programming experience. Finally I made it to two interviews, M&T Bank and Amazon. Both extended offers, but of course I chose Amazon. From what I learned through interviews though, M&T seems to be exceptionally serious about their internship program. You can easily tell since they decided to give a freshman such as me a chance.