How to Get a Software Engineering Internship as a Freshman or Sophomore

Published June 1, 2026 · Finch Team

Updated October 9, 2026

The prevailing advice is to wait until junior year to start seriously applying for software engineering internships. That advice is incomplete.

Getting internship experience early is one of the biggest advantages you can give your junior-year application. A student who has a sophomore-year internship on their resume looks dramatically more competitive than one who doesn't, even if both have similar coursework and projects. The question isn't whether to try. It's how to approach the process given where you actually are.

The Programs Designed Specifically for You

Several major tech companies created structured internship programs for freshmen and sophomores because they recognized the problem: you can't get experience without experience. These programs bypass the implicit experience bar that filters out underclassmen in the standard internship pipeline.

Google STEP (Student Training in Engineering Program)

12 weeks in the summer, designed specifically for first- and second-year CS students. You're paired with a mentor and work on a real team doing real work. STEP interns who perform well often convert to standard SWE intern roles in subsequent summers.

The competition is real: Google gets a high volume of STEP applications. But the bar is calibrated for where you are academically, not where a junior would be. Worth applying even if you feel underqualified.

Microsoft Explore

Also designed for first- and second-year students, 12 weeks, with a rotation component. You cycle through software engineering, program management, and UX research roles. A good fit if you're not 100% sure SWE is your path and want to see what adjacent roles look like from the inside.

Meta University

Similar structure to STEP. Open to freshmen and sophomores. Less well-known than Google STEP but equally legitimate. The application process is competitive, and the program is calibrated appropriately for underclassmen.

Amazon Future Engineer

Aimed at students earlier in their academic path, including community college students and those from underrepresented backgrounds. Not as prestige-weighted as the programs above, but a real paid internship with real engineering work.

Smaller Companies (The Less Obvious Path)

Here's what a lot of students miss: the competition for STEP, Explore, and Meta University is intense. If you're a freshman with no prior work experience and minimal projects, your odds at those programs are low.

Smaller companies (local startups, regional tech firms, non-tech companies with software teams) actively want to hire early-stage students because the competition for those roles is much thinner. The work is often equally meaningful, and a summer doing real software development at a 40-person startup looks good on the resume that eventually gets you a big-company internship the following year.

Don't discount smaller companies as a starting point.

What to Build Before You Apply

As a freshman or sophomore, your resume is thin on experience because you haven't had time to accumulate any. The way to compensate is with projects.

At minimum, you need 1-2 projects that do something. Not "I followed a tutorial." Something you built from scratch, even if it's simple: a web app that fetches an API and displays data, a CLI tool that does something useful, a game, a data analysis notebook. The signal you're sending is: I can write code, I can complete things, and I can explain what I built.

One slightly ambitious project beats three tutorial rewrites. Recruiters looking at underclassman resumes aren't expecting production-quality code. They're looking for evidence that you can build things independently.

GitHub matters more early in your career than it does later. Put your projects there with clear READMEs. When a recruiter reviews a freshman resume with no work experience, they will look at linked repos. Make it easy for them to see that something works and that you wrote it.

See our post on how to show GitHub on your resume for specific formatting tips.

What to Put on Your Resume

The standard CS student resume sections still apply, but the weighting shifts for underclassmen:

Education: More prominent when you're a freshman. GPA above 3.5 is worth including. Relevant coursework (Data Structures, Algorithms, Operating Systems if you've taken them) is reasonable to list while you're actively taking those courses.

Projects: Your main selling point as an underclassman. 2-3 strong projects with bullet points describing what the project does, what technologies you used, and any measurable outcome if you can quantify one. Treat projects with the same weight you'd give work experience.

Skills: List languages and tools you actually know. Python, Java, C++ are credible for a freshman who's taken intro courses. React and Node are credible if you've actually built something with them.

No experience section if you have none. Don't fill it with unrelated retail jobs unless they demonstrate something directly relevant. Recruiters reviewing underclassman applications understand the situation. A missing work experience section reads fine. A padded one reads awkward.

When to Apply and How to Think About the Timeline

The recruiting calendar for underclassmen programs mirrors regular internship recruiting: applications open in August-September for the following summer. Google STEP and Microsoft Explore both open their application cycles in fall. If you wait until January, many spots are already filled.

Start in September of the year before your target summer. Yes, that means if you're starting freshman year in September 2026, you're already within the window to apply for a summer 2027 internship. It seems early. It is early. But that's when applications are live.

You can also start smaller: a lot of startups and local companies don't recruit on the fall timeline. They hire year-round. If you missed the fall cycle for big programs, you can still find a smaller company internship by applying in February or March.

See our breakdown of the full internship application timeline if you want the complete seasonal picture.

How to Find the Roles

Company career pages are your first stop. Search "internship freshman sophomore" or "underclassmen" on company job boards. There's a curated GitHub repo called "underclassmen-internships" (search it on GitHub) that lists programs explicitly open to first- and second-year students. It's updated every year by the community and covers dozens of programs.

Finch can speed up the search. Its board lists open internships and new-grad roles, newest first, with an Internships filter, and each week Finch picks the 3 that fit your major best, with the reasons. When you're applying to 20-30 companies in fall, less time hunting for postings means more time on actual skill building.

The Realistic Expectation Setting

Most freshmen applying aggressively in their first year will hear silence from big-company programs. That's normal. These programs are selective, and you're competing against people who have more built up.

The right frame: every application is practice. Every OA you take tells you something about where your gaps are. Even rejection emails are useful data. A student who applies to 40 companies as a freshman, doesn't land Google STEP, but lands a smaller internship, walks into junior-year applications with experience, a story, and a much clearer picture of how the process works.

The student who waited until junior year to start all of this is the one who's at a disadvantage.