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How to become a competitive candidate: No Internships? No Problem!

lowinertia·Jul 21, 2026·Updated Jul 24, 2026

Who this is for:

  • You are looking for a full-time entry level engineer or co-op/internship opportunities
  • You don’t have any “relevant” experience on your resume
  • You are willing to do whatever it takes to change the situation

Do relevant experience matter? Yes, Absolutely

99% of the hiring managers and engineers in the interview team will spend most of the time in the relevant experience section. If they don’t like the experience section, the resume will get lost in someone’s Teams or Slack chat .

So, the odds may be against you right now.


Now, how can we this around ↩️ 

( You can follow this framework for any problem solving )


1. Don’t give up. Have confidence in yourself

Elon Musk famously didn’t get an interview at Netscape. He even physically visited the Netscape lobby to try and get noticed, which was a failed attempt. Now, he runs Tesla, SpaceX, NeuraLink, etc.

Soichiro Honda, the mechanical genius behind Honda Motor Co., was completely rejected by Toyota for an engineering role early in his career.

Burrell Smith, the legendary hardware engineer who designed the self-correcting digital logic board for the original Macintosh, was completely skipped over for engineering interviews by Apple’s standard hiring filters.

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Brilliant engineers get overlooked many times. However, great opportunities eventually find those with passion and perseverance.

2. Analyze the reason

It’s important to understand why having relevant experience is favored. Here is one example based on my experience leading engineering teams in Fortune 500 Companies and Venture-backed Startups

You may assume that the problem here was the 2 mistakes made. 1. Not knowing the print’s capability 2. Not knowing how the print could behave with insufficient resins.

Important insight 🔥 

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Mistakes happen. I’ve made these mistakes myself. The real issue here is that there are hard-to teach soft skills and work ethics.
  • Knowing when to ask: The engineer was unfamiliar with SLA. The engineer could have researched what kind of issues to be mindful of or have the design / print setup reviewed by more experienced engineer. It is important to know when to stop to ask someone or research the right information.
  • Having a sense of ownership: Knowing the team already lost a day due to the mistake, you need to make sure the print happens. Walking away and not following up until the day shows the lack of a sense of ownership.

This is because Unreliable engineers continue to make same mistakes and are detrimental to the team. Unskilled engineers with the right attitude and work ethic will learn quickly and contribute to the team.

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This is why relevant experience is preferred. Having previous experiences in the resume give the interviewer an insights into the candidate’s tendencies and work ethic. Without any “stories” to go over together, it is really difficult to evaluate a candidate.

3. Do something about it. Start now!

Then, what should you do?

Start your own project now and document your journey. Pick a problem that you want to solve and chip away at it one day at a time.

Do’s

  1. Show that you are a self-starter. Without being told, you took the initiative to tackle something on your own. You got stuck and you found someone to ask or learned something on your own.
  2. Show that you are resourceful. You will pick up different skills along the way that will be valuable to the organization.
  3. Show that you have the work ethic and perseverance. The biggest factor of any engineering project is how you react when you face failure. Share your failure stories and how you overcame those problems.
  4. Show that you learn from mistakes.
  5. Utilize AI to research and learn quickly. Don’t blindly trust the outputs, but you can gain information quickly and verify the sources.

Don’ts

  1. Don’t get another “certification” or take another “course”. They won’t really provide with an advantage in your job application. Education is basically free and easily accessible these days. Don’t waste your money and time. Utilize AI tools and free resources online.
  2. Don’t just follow someone else’s tutorial. Of course, you want to reference what they did, but don’t blindly follow. You will not learn anything in the process
  3. Don’t blindly depend on AI to tell you what to do next. Same theme here. Reference what AI recommends, but take this opportunity to develop your critical brain to decide how you

lowinertia is here to help

  1. Start an engineering portfolio at lowinertia HERE
  2. Choose a problem you want to tackle with engineering solutions
  3. Utilize our notebook feature. With so much AI generated contents in job applications, employers will start asking for evidence of your work. Our time stamped entry feature will provide you tools to document your journey and show the proof of your hard work.
  4. If you have any questions or get stuck, ask away in our substack page. I (formerly lead engineer at fortune 500 / VC startups) will try to help as much as possible.
  5. Don’t know how to start? subscribe to my Free failin’ channel! I will be documenting my own journey of taking on new challenges.




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