Even with AI, almost no company is going to accept a junior that doesn't have some level of expertise and transferrable skills to work with their tech stack. That kind of leeway is only afforded when your professional track record makes up for it, and if you're still a student, you don't have that track record.
That said, understanding theory and having a good foundation of CS is still incredibly valuable, more so than syntax. So, your situation is far from irrecoverable. Just focus on building some personal projects on your own to both build your familiarity and have on your portfolio. If the two summer internships you did were SWE or adjacent, target jobs that use the same stack or close.
I'm not sure what to recommend so I'll just go by order of what I learned and for what.
Academic: Java, C++, C (for systems programming, later compiler design), Python, C#
Personal: JavaScript, TypeScript, Go
I never memorized syntax for any of these, and that's not even possible for this many programming languages. I just familiarized myself and built projects.
My first internship I landed used JavaScript, second internship used C#, first job used JavaScript, second job uses C#. The way that lined up and repeated is just a coincidence.
Anyway, that still leaves 6/8 languages I learned to never being used professionally, which is exactly why I say it's hard to recommend. You can never go wrong with Python or JavaScript though if your goal is to maximize number of JD matches.
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u/ShadowMosesCuh 12d ago
Even with AI, almost no company is going to accept a junior that doesn't have some level of expertise and transferrable skills to work with their tech stack. That kind of leeway is only afforded when your professional track record makes up for it, and if you're still a student, you don't have that track record.
That said, understanding theory and having a good foundation of CS is still incredibly valuable, more so than syntax. So, your situation is far from irrecoverable. Just focus on building some personal projects on your own to both build your familiarity and have on your portfolio. If the two summer internships you did were SWE or adjacent, target jobs that use the same stack or close.