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Landing an Amazon Internship as an Underclassman: What Actually Worked

Michael Forde

02 Apr 2025 • 8 min read

Hey blog, it's been a minute! Hope all my readers are doing well and you're surviving the Spring semester whether you're still taking midterms like me or are already prepping for finals.

The last month of my life has been filled with awesome successes but also overcoming rejection. I want to share how I landed an Amazon Propel Program SDE internship this summer, as well as advice for navigating the interview process. The Amazon Propel Program is a specialized internship opportunity designed specifically for underrepresented students in tech, offering mentorship, skill development, and hands-on experience in software development at one of the world's largest tech companies. Whether you're just starting your CS major or already hunting for internships, I hope my experience helps make your path a little clearer.

Background

First, I'll start with a bit about myself. I have always been a tech guy, I was first obsessed with video games, then hacking video games, then hosting video game servers and a host of other weird technical skills that I picked up during my childhood.

In high school, I never took a formal programming class. In fact, I never really coded a project from scratch. My core experience came from running a homeserver that I started in my sophomore year. I had become fascinated by linux, Neovim, running websites and web applications and opensource software. I quickly found myself diving into open-source selfhosted projects such as Nextcloud (google drive), Jellyfin (netflix), and dozens of more apps. I watched hundreds of hours of selfhosted/tech youtube content which introduced me to tons of concepts that I encounter now as a CS major. I learned about Docker deployment, unix administration, and much more. I spent days in the terminal and my friends in HS would always think I'm hacking or doing something crazy. I was mostly just copying and pasting, reading documentation, and driving myself nuts debugging an app.

While I wasn't creating projects myself, these years of exploration taught me foundational dev skills like navigating the terminal, reading documentation, reading Stack Overflow or Github Issues (most people default to AI now but I still go to these sites when I first encounter an issue), and being curious about learning new technologies.

I don't recommend for anyone to go to these lengths to secure a tech internship. In fact my experience is very different from many of my peers who simply took a AP CS course in high school and continued in university. I do think that self-discovery in tech is one of the best ways to get started. Even if it is not the marketable skills you see on a job posting, things like game dev, self hosting, full stack web development are hobbies that can help one decide is software really something they see themselves doing.

CS Education: The Fundamentals That Matter

University really taught me the fundamentals that are crucial to landing a tech internship. There are two concepts that a student needs to get down to secure the job.

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) Principles
1. Encapsulation
2. Abstraction
3. Inheritance
4. Polymorphism
Data Structures & Algorithms
1. Common Data Structures
  1. Arrays
  2. LinkedLists
  3. Stacks & Queues
  4. Hash tables and sets
  5. Trees & Graphs
  6. Heaps
2. Common algorithms
  1. Searching (linear / binary search)
  2. Tree traversals
  3. Reversing a list
  4. String manipulation

In university my first CS class, Intro to Java taught me the first core skill. OOP. As my first formal language (I had done a bit of Python in high school for science, but mostly in data science), java was good for drilling in the basics of OOP.

For the technical interview, you must have a solid grasp of OOP principles as you'll be asked to do things like write a class to solve a problem from scratch in a whiteboard environment.

For DSA, I am actually currently taking my schools DSA course. I found the class to be helpful in understanding key concepts like runtime and space analysis which are crucial skills for the tech interview.

As my interview approached faster than my semester schedule, I actually learned most of the DSA on my own through self-studying using resources that I will share in the next section.

Preparing for the Technical Interview

How I Approached LeetCode

ngl I don't like LeetCode. These interviews seem to test how well we can memorize a LC question rather than if we are capable engineers. However, the system requires LeetCode and I will also admit that once you get past the difficulty of starting LeetCode, solving the questions will become easier and satisfying.

There’s a lot of advice online on how to start LeetCode, and while I won’t dictate a specific method, I’ll share what worked for me.

My favorite resources

For getting an introduction to new algorithms and data structures as well as the most common patterns I did most of my problems from the grind 75. This author of a popular list called the blind 75 created a great website for creating a practice schedule that actually gives you 169 questions to turn you into a LeetCode pro. So far I've completed 56 accounting for most of the easies and just about 10 mediums. On LeetCode I'm at 90 solves as of writing with a breakdown of 59 easies, 31 mediums and 0 hards (lol). Again most problems came from grind 75, but a bit closer to the interview once I could start getting easies I got LeetCode premium and started doing some Amazon tagged questions.

For learning how to do these leetcode questions, I used a few resources:

The Technical Interview Handbook
- This resource was created by the same author as the blind 75.
- He has tips for technical interviews as well, data structures cheatsheets. Give it a look and try some of the problems for the common data structures.
- This really helped me nail the fundamentals and helped with my explanations/intuition.
Neetcode
- Neetcode goes without any introduction. He's a LeetCode legend and makes some of the best videos of DSA.
- I didn't watch too many of his videos to learn because he codes in python and I use java, but his explanations of the problem and the steps are transferable to any language and helped me on problems when I got stuck.

With these resources the last step is to have the right mentality about LeetCode. It's common to get stuck and feel like giving up. Especially when starting I did look at solutions and I would say solutions are good for learning because you can study what the solution is and try to recreate that on your own and for future problems. Use any resource you find and keep grinding and your LeetCode skills will skyrocket.

This summer, my goal is to hit 300 LeetCode solves by September. Let’s see if I can make it!

Lessons From My Journey

Find mentors / peers to hold you accountable.
Try to do a few mock interviews, especially if you're new to interviewing to get accustomed to the interview environment.
Learn how to explain your code, plan your problem before coding (edge cases, pseudo code), learn how to dry-run your code (you can't compile code in Amazon interviews).
Understand that it may not happen the first time, but persistence pays off! For me Amazon was my third round of interviews. Before that, I had received one rejection and was still waiting for a decision on another. Throughout the process I was anxious and felt like it wasn't going to work out. Believe in yourself and trust your hard work!

Essential Resources for CS Students

Here are the key resources that helped me land my internship:

1. Underclassmen Internship Opportunities

⭐ Repo for Underclassmen Internship Opportunities

This repo is a must-bookmark for any freshman/sophomore interested in SWE. It's where I found the majority of internships to apply to, including my Amazon opportunity. I also discovered amazing fellowship opportunities through this resource! Keep track of when these internships open up and prepare in advance to get your application in ASAP.

2. Programming and DSA Resources

While I didn't use this one too much, it's a comprehensive collection for DSA education with links to excellent courses and learning resources.

I want to acknowledge that I couldn't have got to where I am without my mentors, peers, and family that supported me. Organizations like ColorStack and the HeadStart Fellowship really helped give me a leg up on prepping for internships. I highly recommend students to check out these orgs and get involved with student groups!

What's Next? My Summer in Seattle!

I'm excited to document my journey as an Amazon Propel Program SDE intern in Seattle this summer! If you've enjoyed this post, subscribe to my blog for:

Day-in-the-life updates from Amazon
Seattle exploration adventures
Real insights into what a tech internship actually involves
Lessons learned along the way

My goal is to grow this community from 22 to over 100 subscribers this summer. As someone who just landed this opportunity, I want to share the unfiltered experience to help others following a similar path. No sugar-coating, just real experiences.

What do you want to know about interning at Amazon? Drop your questions below, and I'll cover them in future posts! Also, subscribe to my blog so you don’t miss my internship updates!

P.S. If you found this post helpful, consider sharing it with CS friends who might benefit. Growing together is what this community is all about!