An international student's honest account of 6 months, 1,318 applications, and one offer — what worked, what was a waste of time, and what consistency actually looks like when nobody's watching.
1,318 applications. 6 months. 30 recruiter callbacks. 15+ interviews. 10 projects shipped. One offer.
This is not a success story with a clean arc. This is what it actually looks like to get a job in the middle of the worst tech layoff wave in a decade — as an international student with a visa clock ticking and no connections in a new city.
If you ask me what the secret sauce is, I'd say consistency. But the thing nobody tells you about consistency is that the work itself isn't the hard part. The hard part is that you're running a marathon where nobody tells you where the finish line is. You just keep running until someone says yes — or until your visa runs out. Whichever comes first.
I graduated in May 2025 with an engineering degree and started at a small startup building AI agents. The job was remote, East Coast hours. I was waking up at 6 AM in California to match their schedule, working from a room in a city I barely knew.
The thing about Boston is that the summers make you fall in love. But once you experience the winter, you realize two-thirds of your year will be spent in the dark — literally and figuratively. I wanted sun, I wanted energy, and I wanted to be around people building the things I cared about. So I decided to move to San Francisco. I booked everything a week before my lease ended and showed up knowing nobody.
No friends, no network, no plan. But I spoke the same language everyone here speaks — AI. So I started showing up. Luma events, meetups, tech talks, anything with free food and interesting people. I said yes to everything because I had nothing to lose and nowhere else to be.
One of those "yes" moments was Notion's Make conference. I went because Notion was my favorite product. I left with something I didn't expect: a new understanding of what I actually wanted to do. At the conference, I met solution engineers for the first time — people who work directly with clients, help them set up and use the product, and solve real problems face-to-face. I didn't even know the role existed.
Something clicked. Purely coding isn't fun for me. I'd known this for a while but never had a name for the alternative. Solution engineering was the answer: technical enough to build, human enough to talk. I stopped applying for generic SWE roles that same week and started looking for positions where I could do both.
That shift in direction is what led me to my first real interview — and my first real heartbreak.
The new focus led me to an AI infrastructure startup looking for a solution engineer. The interview process took two weeks and overlapped with my birthday trip to Yosemite.
Picture this: I'm driving toward the mountains with my girlfriend, and I need to make two calls — one with the CTO, one with the CEO. There's no cell signal in Yosemite. So I pull over at a Mexican restaurant off the highway, connect to their Wi-Fi, and do both interviews from a parking lot while she waits in the car. Happy birthday to me.
I thought it went well. I was all in on this one — I'd spent two weeks preparing, rehearsing, researching. This felt like my shot.
The next day, they told me they were looking for someone with more experience.
That rejection didn't just sting — it shook me. I'd invested everything into one opportunity and came away with nothing. Worse, the feedback was the kind you can't fix overnight: more experience. But how do you get experience if nobody gives you the chance? It felt like a locked door with the key on the other side.