Internships and Market Matching
It’s that time of year again: computer science students all over the country are deep in the internship application process, trying their luck at scores of different companies in hopes of landing a coveted internship for the summer of 2016. Google is often considered to be among the best companies one could intern with, due to a combination of their prestige, size and the variety of the projects that their interns can work on. However, they are known for having a brutally difficult application process.
The final stage in this process occurs once the candidate has made it past the technical interview stage; where the company has decided that this candidate deserves an internship if (and only if) there is a suitable project for them to work on. As such, the candidate enters what is known as the host matching process, where different project managers at Google try to find interns for their projects based on the skills and desires of the interns. Multiple theories have cropped up as to the best strategies for making it through the host matching process; some advocate being very specific about your likes and abilities, others advocate being as general as possible.
Assuming that Google uses a process similar to the algorithm for generating a perfect matching on a market, it would seem that presenting oneself as having a variety of possible interests and skills would work very well, as an candidate (the “buyer”) who has equal value for all items (“positions”) on the market will be able to buy from any seller (“host”) in a matching. However, because not all candidates do get matches, the reality of the situation is that there is necessarily a constricted set: there are more buyers than sellers. As such, having a low value for every item on the market can cause a buyer to not get a match at all, as for every item on the market there will be another buyer who values it more highly than him.
Looking at it a different way, where the buyers are the hosts and the sellers are the intern candidates, it would seem that having a very particular passion about a certain project is a more optimal strategy, as it is a logical assumption that a host would derive more value from hiring an intern who is passionate about their project. Unfortunately, however, putting all of your value in a single item runs the risk of there being another candidate who values the position more than you do, or who has a better skill set. If this happens you’re in a bad spot, as you’ve indicated little to no interest in any other positions.
The best strategy would be to somehow know the interests and skills of every other candidate on the market, and to indicate interest and skill in an area where few others have, to maximize your relative attractiveness to hosts. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t release this information, and it’s not feasible to ask every other intern candidate what they like, so you might just have to make a guess and hope for the best.
https://medium.com/@andretacuyan/how-to-increase-your-chances-of-getting-an-internship-at-google-2fed4ce91b35