How I landed my first developer Job

I would like to share my short story on how I landed my first Job as a Front-End Developer.

A little background about my education: I was always interested in the tech since I was in school and learned C++ during last years of school. I finished my schooling in 2014 and got admission in an average Private engineering college. During first 2 years of my college, I didn't focus on learning much except a 2 months training in Java. However, I had a good understanding of core concepts of programming.

In the third year, I decided to learn web development. After taking few short courses on HTML and CSS I started "The web Developer Bootcamp" by Colt Steele. It was such a nice course that made my interest in Web development. I learned about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, NodeJS, ExpressJS etc. After that, I took few more courses on Angular and Java.

At the end of my third year, I applied for a number of Internships but didn't get selected for any. But I still kept applying.

During the final year of my college, I appeared for a few interviews for internship, I got rejected in most of them initially, but after a few months, I started getting positive feedback and finally cleared 3 interviews for unpaid internships. But I needed some monetary rewards as well to keep myself motivated and during one of the interviews, after I cleared all the rounds, the HR told me that I won't get any stipend as I was from a tier 3 college. That hit me very hard so I decided to move to NCR, a place with better opportunities. I appeared for 4 interviews on a single day, failed in 3 but cleared the last one. It was in a small startup for a profile of Web Developer Intern with a some stipend as well.

The internship started in February. In the initial 2 weeks, I learned about some Java frameworks like Struts, Spring & Hibernate and then Angular. I worked on a few bug fixes and enhancements in a Big Enterprise Java Application. Most of the work was repetitive and kind of boring, so I kept looking for better opportunities.

After a few more failed interviews, I cleared an interview for a front-end developer intern profile at another startup with almost double stipend and ReactJs as the main technology. I left the previous company and joined the new one.

In the new company, I learned ReactJs and started working on a project. Finally, after 2 months, I got a PPO and got a full-time Front-End Developer role with a good enough salary package according to my skills and experience. I am happy with my current Job and a lot more is left to achieve.