I'm a third year CS student at a mid-tier Canadian university. I transferred here this year from a smaller local school, mostly because I couldn't afford much at the time. My GPA is 3.2/4.0 (it was stronger at my old school), and I expect it to go up after this semester since last year was more of a preparing year.

I've applied to almost 100 places for Winter and Summer 2027 and so far I have a couple of online assessments and mostly rejections or silence. I went to career fairs in October and had really good conversations. Recruiters were engaged, took my resume, gave me pointers on where it could be stronger, and told me to connect on LinkedIn, which I did. But since then is has been nothing. My projects at the time were weaker than they are now, but they still seemed interested.

I'm not in a co-op program, I have no previous internship, and I don't have connections who can refer me. Right now I'm building more projects and doing volunteer work on an open-source project to get real codebase experience.…