Phan Thuy Linh graduated with a Computer Science degree from Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania last December after just three and a half years of study. Even before receiving her diploma, she had already secured a full-time job offer from a tech startup in San Francisco and was actively fielding responses from several other top-tier companies.
Prior to her graduation, Linh built an impressive resume as a software development intern at Expedia, the company behind massive travel platforms like Hotels.com and Trivago. She also completed an internship at Uber, the world’s largest ride-hailing technology firm.
Between August 2024 and November last year, Linh received internship offers from 14 different companies, including industry heavyweights like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, LinkedIn, and Mastercard.
Phan Thuy Linh in a photo she provided. |
From a gap year to a hackathon turning point
Linh is a former math major who graduated from Le Hong Phong High School for the Gifted in Ho Chi Minh City in 2021. Unsure about her exact career interests after graduation, she decided to take a gap year to work instead of immediately enrolling in university.
Watching many of her peers pursue marketing, Linh initially took part-time marketing roles at local startups. She participated in consumer psychology research and joined various student-led projects.
Her ultimate turning point arrived when friends studying computer science invited her to a hackathon, an intense event where participants collaborate to build new software products within just a few days. Linh was immediately fascinated by the process and began eagerly exploring how websites are built and how backend systems function.
She soon saw new opportunities after speaking with students who had studied abroad. However, at that point in the year, most major universities in the United States had already closed their admissions windows. Determined not to lose another year, Linh applied to the few schools still accepting applications, admitting she did not actually think she would be able to go to the U.S.
Eventually, her determination paid off. She won a scholarship to Gettysburg, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania ranked 58th among national liberal arts colleges in 2026 by U.S. News & World Report. She decided to enroll, undeterred by the fact that the school was not historically renowned for its computer science program.
Navigating competitive job market
During her freshman year, Linh still felt uncertain about her exact career trajectory. She actively sought help from Vietnamese international student communities, asking for academic advice and career guidance. After exploring various courses during her first year, she gained confidence, decided to persist in computer science, and began aggressively applying for internships.
Linh described the tech job market as fiercely competitive. She and her friends each submitted between 300 and 500 applications, often while completing the grueling short algorithm tests required by many tech companies. She noted that even with a strong profile, a lucky candidate might only receive five to ten interview invitations from that massive pool.
When her first interviews finally materialized, she unfortunately failed them all.
Linh continuously refined her resume, built small personal coding projects, and studied complex algorithms more intensively.
During the winter break, while many of her classmates traveled or relaxed, she stayed home to practice technical interview questions. She also sought guidance from industry mentors on how to perform better in high-pressure interview settings.
Her hard work paid off when she passed interviews at two companies and chose to join Expedia as a software development intern. Her primary responsibilities involved improving the platform’s data retrieval speed and migrating historical project data to large-scale databases for advanced analysis.
In the summer of 2024, despite a noticeable slowdown in the broader U.S. tech job market, Linh continued to receive internship offers after sending out a more targeted batch of around 100 applications. She kept applying widely simply to better understand the market’s shifting expectations. As a result, acceptance emails began arriving in quick succession from Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Uber.
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Phan Thuy Linh as an intern at Uber, August 2025. Photo courtesy of Linh |
The power of proactive networking
Looking back on her journey, Linh shared that the most valuable lesson she learned was how to proactively seek out opportunities. This was a significant personal hurdle, as she considers herself “naturally introverted and not particularly skilled at initiating conversations.”
She realized that large tech companies often receive thousands of applications for positions that only hire a few dozen candidates. To stand out, whenever Linh applied to a company, she would search for and connect with its current employees on LinkedIn to request an internal referral. She believes these referrals are highly advantageous because they signal to recruiters that someone already working at the company finds the candidate’s profile convincing.
Linh estimates she has reached out to nearly 5,000 professionals on LinkedIn seeking advice or support. Although the actual acceptance and response rate for such cold requests is very low, she noted that the successful referrals almost always led to direct interview opportunities.
Beyond digital networking, Linh frequently attends in-person technology conferences to meet recruiters, engineers, and tech founders face-to-face. Pushing past her comfort zone, she takes the initiative to start conversations, express genuine interest in their work, and present her own technical skills.
She recalled one instance where she flew nearly six hours to California just to attend a specific conference. While there, her networking efforts led to an on-the-spot interview invitation from the software company Rippling, which eventually resulted in a secured internship.
Alongside her professional networking, Linh continues to participate in hackathons to gain practical experience.
Pham Quang Vu, a senior software engineer at Reddit who has mentored Linh since she first began applying for internships, observed that her success stems from her proactive attitude. He recalled that Linh was initially very shy, lacking in confidence, and reluctant to talk about herself or her achievements. Today, she not only aggressively pursues elite opportunities but also openly shares her ideas and actively supports younger students in their studies and job applications.
Inspiring the next generation of women in STEM
Linh expressed that she has been deeply inspired by many women in tech who came before her, women who not only succeeded professionally but also made time to guide others and share vital resources with the community.
In the future, alongside building a stable engineering career, she hopes to actively contribute to the women in STEM community.
For those who are still hesitant about pursuing computer science or who are actively searching for career direction, Linh offers a simple piece of advice: “just try.” She noted that many people falsely believe they must be exceptionally gifted at math to succeed in the tech field. However, aside from highly specialized areas like artificial intelligence and machine learning, there are countless software engineering roles that do not require advanced mathematics.
She advises young students to give themselves the time and the chance to gain real-world experience, rather than mentally blocking their own opportunities from the very start.
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