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Edit: I recalled the difficulty I had to hit the right links for my interests when I passed first year. So I have decided to include some links and references in the answer. This answer is for the students who come to college without much exposure on the various fields in CSE. In the first year, during college participate in as many club events (try out Web Dev, App Dev, Competitive Coding, Paper Presentation). After you have seen a bit of everything, it will be easier to realize your strengths and weaknesses. It is completely all right if you have a lot of weaknesses as long as you have a single strength. During the holidays you can enroll yourself in a MOOC course to see if you are really interested in the topic that you feel you are good at. Below are some links to check for the more powerful MOOCs out there. ...

Referrals are a way for an existing employee to endorse someone who wishes work at Amazon. An endorsement does not guarantee an interview, however with any large sized companies, referrals are a really nice way to increase the chances that your resume at the least gets screened by a recruiter. Most people are aware of this benefit of referral. With platforms like Quora/LinkedIn, it has also become very easy for someone to discover present employees at any of the firms, however I’d like to point out a few flaws with a blind approach for a referral. ...

I had applied for internship at Microsoft (SWE Intern ‘16) and Amazon (SDE Intern ‘17). This resume is from when I was in 5th Semester. Microsoft had been on campus for Interns. I basically had nothing at that time to construct a good looking resume apart from my test scores and a few competitions. The biggest takeaway is that the interviewers did not question me anything on my resume since there was nothing fancy. I was strictly judged on the basis of a few programming questions. I was not very confident of a few small projects that I had done. And I decided to exlude them from the resume. In my opinion, anything that you are not confident about should not make it to your resume. ...

I interned at Amazon Development Centre (Hyderabad) for 5 months at the start of 2017 while I was in my 8th Semester. In my 7th Semester, I had been trying hard to secure an internship in some startup or corporate. Amazon was in my wish-list because I had friends who had interned there during the summers and had awesome things to say about the experience. During December 2016, I was contacted by a recruiter for an intern position after a senior had referred me for an Intern position. After a couple of rounds of interview, I got selected for a position in Amazon’s Hyderabad campus. I was really happy because Hyderabad was a city I was familiar with and I had a few friends interning there. After doing a little bit research about my team, I got to know I would be working with the Amazon Home Services team. Back then I never knew Amazon was into such a business line for selling services to customers and I thought it to be pretty interesting. ...

I interned at Microsoft IDC (Hyderabad) which is their second biggest campus in the world outside of Redmond in the summers of 2016. Hence, I am literally reliving the experience after 4 years as I write this answer. A little bit on how I got the offer in the first place, Microsoft visited our campus in August 2015 to hire SDEs and SDE Interns and that’s when I was able to clear about 4 rounds of interviews. I got a cool T-Shirt with the Microsoft logo which I still treasure. I had about a year’s gap from the time I received the offer until I actually started interning in May 2016. There was a huge build up and me and my friends were brimming with excitement thinking about the opportunity that lies ahead of us. Microsoft does a really nice job of ensuring that Interns do not have to think anything apart from the Internship itself. They took care of our stay for a two month period and provided us with transportation which made our 30 minute daily commute super smooth. They arranged for our daily meals within the campus and our round trip flights from the city where we interned at. Apart from this there was a good stipend which made me realise my renumeration value for the first time. ...

Where am I today I am writing a travel blog after 8 years. Back in 2017 when I started my job and started earning, I thought I would do 2 trips (1 international, and 1 within India) and write about it. In 2017-2018, I did start strong writing some of my travel experiences on Quora. It was also very deeply appreciated by my family and my colleagues. But as it happened, I gave in to my own laziness, procrastination and entirely stopped writing. Ever since then, after numerous trips, it’s now 2026 and I finally feel the urge to write again once in a while. ...

TLDR; If you are here for just pictures scroll to the bottom. A little disclosure about me before you start reading this blog, I am Arpan and I hail from India, currently working in Hyderabad. In this post, I am going to endorse a few websites and agencies which helped me to plan for my trip. I am not being paid for advertising any particular firm and these are just my personal choices. I will segregate the blog into timelines relative to the start date of the trip. This blog is not just a travel itinerary helper, I have penned down my experiences and mistakes as well that can be avoided. ...