College Student Applies to 456 Internships: Only Gets 1 Offer

College student and coder/programmer Olie Wu (@oliesandroid) went viral on TikTok after sharing the extreme lengths that he went through in order to get an internship.

All of his effort was chronicled in an impressive spreadsheet that left many users on the platform in total awe.

Olie begins his video with a thumbs up he flashes into the camera. A text overlay he places on the clip indicates the insane amount of work that he put into securing a single internship: it’s very clear that the coder was taking his pursuit of the internship he had his eyes on very, very seriously.

“456 applications, 56 interviews, and 0 sleep in 4 months, all for 1 internship,” he pens, while adding in a caption: “worth it,” followed by an emoji with a smiley face sticking its tongue out.

In the video, he scrolls through hundreds of lines of spreadsheet entries containing pertinent information to the internships he’s applying to, clearly delineating that he’s not telling any tall tales, fibs, or humdingers.

Several viewers exclaimed that they were impressed by Olie’s dedication to the task at hand, but there were others who were interested in knowing how he was able to structure the spreadsheets and compile the data in a way that made it possible for him to track the status of all the internships.

Olie obliged the TikTokers who were looking for the secret sauce when it came to digitally organizing their internship prospects in a follow-up video where he walked everyone through the particulars of his masterfully curated spreadsheet.

“I got you, so here is how I built the spreadsheet that tracked 456 applications.”

He continued, “Which, in retrospect, is way too many, don’t be applying to all those. Not worth it,” he cautions, telling folks that there’s no reason to submit that many applications to so many places.

Olie went on with his tutorial, demonstrating on a computer screen where folks should be going to get themselves a similar spreadsheet, “For starters go to my portfolio, click on the TikTok section, and then you see this right here.”

He navigates through his web page, which you can access here, followed by the “TikTok” link here’s referring to, which you can then access by clicking here.

The Google Doc is all right there: ready and waiting for you to put in vital bits of information for the interviews you have lined up, and Olie was very punctilious when it came to the qualifiers he selected for the interviews.

He included the following column titles:

• Company
• Status
• Link (to the actual application)
• Done? (indicating whether or not you’ve completely filled out your application for the internship)
• Google Search Link (explained further down, it’s a nifty little feature)

The second round of qualifiers fell under the the category of “Interview Tracking” which is indicated in a row above the following columns:

• Company
• Take By (the date that the interview expires and the company will no longer be fielding interns)
• OA (which stands for online assessment, as businesses will often require applicants complete said assessments as part of the screening process as a barometer for which tasks they’re capable of completing)
• Phone Screen
• Interview
• Done?

And while there were several people who were excited to adopt Olie’s tracking techniques for their own prospective internships, one user said that the entire process seemed very, very intimidating: “bruh this is scaring me for moving to the US one day, even tho i have a masters and already 3 years experience rn”

He continued to talk about his spreadsheet in the video: “And a couple things it does so you have company, the status with all these different statuses,” he demonstrates the various “status” buttons in question that are color coded.

He continued “The application, if you’re done or not,” he glosses over these qualifies as they seem fairly straightforward, but then explains why he decided to include a Google Search Link column.

He demonstrated how when he writes the company name in a cell in that column, it automatically populates Google search results for that company in the corresponding “Google Search Link” cell.

If you’ve checked out the sheet for yourself, you may’ve noticed that when you scroll down the lower left hand side of the sheet that Olie included a “Focus Group” section, which is where he places internship interviews at companies for which he has referrals for.

The TikToker caps off his video encouraging viewers to “feel free to copy” his format while wishing them good luck in securing a position.

While Olie said that he didn’t recommend applying to as many internships as he did, there were several viewers who commented on how impressive it was of him to lock in 56 meetings.

“How’d you get 56 interviews that’s impressive,” one person wrote.

While someone else did a little bit of arithmetic and discovered Olie’s percentage rate was admirable: “12% interview rate is pretty insane tbh”

It does seem like ultimately, he did indeed need to go that deep with his application process as Olie said he only received one offer from the 56 interviews he secured from the 456 applications he sent out.