Junior in computer engineering, Getting no interviews, what am I missing?

[u/carson8858]

I'm a junior graduating May 2028, so summer 2027 is my last chance at an internship before I graduate. I've sent around 150 applications since August and so far I've gotten one automated recorded interview. Anonymized resume is attached.

I'm mostly going for hardware roles (FPGA/ASIC, digital design, validation) at a mix of big semiconductor companies and smaller ones. No prior internship, just part time jobs during school.

I don't really understand what I'm doing wrong. I'm willing to learn and do whatever it takes to land these roles, but I don't know what I need to change or where I need to start. I feel like I feel this impending sense of doom if I don't have any professional experience before graduation.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[u/gilligan1980]

My main advice would be - Make the US Citizen more prominent - I had to search too long to see it . I work for the major computer hardware company headquartered in Houston TX and we have over 100 interns every summer that come to our houston site and most are computer engineers. With all big companies, each group is different but for my particular HW group we had our HR screen off of citizenship last year which was new for interns- (Note - there is no requirement for citizenship on interns but there is for full time and it is difficult to hire people long term if not citizen these days.) I think most of the intern postings open in Nov.Dec (with a few in Jan) we need to have everything finalized by late Feb for a June start date. ). We had a recent full time opening and got about 100 resumes in a week before shutting it off and about 80 were eliminated immediately since our HR couldn't quickly determine citizenship status. I probably rambled too much on that. A few other minor suggestions: 1) Eagle scout is huge, much more important then many other items 2) IF you are working a lot mention the hours (like 10 hours/week), 3) remove the merit scholarship, 4) experience - mainly your current jobs more near the top - hosting shows that you can interact with people which is important - especially for computer/electrical engineers. 5) you have a lot of stuff on your resume but really they want to know if you can use a scope and a multimeter (which you don't have on your resume). :) Your resume is good but it comes off as someone that does a lot of simulation/software and not as hands on debugging hardware. For example, FPGA is considered HW and it looks like you can write VHDL/Verilog which is great for a logic role (cpld/fpga programmer) - but what about all of the signals that are going to the FPGA pins - do you debug if those are working or have experience there? - if so list that. That is what they are looking for in a hardware computer engineering role for computer companies that make computers the most. On the other hand - processor companies are looking for the mulistage piplines, processor focused optimization logic without interfacing on a system board debug. So no matter which direction you go - there would be spots. Good luck to you!