John Deere is a company where my professional software engineering (SWE) career started. I have done two SWE internships and eventually accepted a full time role, on a team of my choice, with Deere. The hardest part was getting my first internship which is what I will discuss in this blog post.
First of all, John Deere is a large company that makes a wide variety of equipment ranging from lawnmowers to tractors. It has been around since 1837. I was always aware of its existence, but I was not targeting Deere at the time of my application. In 2019, remote work was rare so I was prioritizing companies based out of California (as close as possible to my university).
I was aggressively applying all over with almost no results. Fortunately, my school had an engineering internship fair. It was scheduled over my classes. I recall feeling bad about skipping class in order to attend, but in hindsight I am very happy that I prioritized career development over classes. Some of my classmates did not and they definitely experienced more difficulty landing a job closer to the graduation date.
This was my first career fair targeted at engineers and it was overwhelming. It was crowded and sweaty. Companies had long lines of students waiting to chat with a recruiter and hand them their resume. Some companies had so many students that it would take half an hour before you got to chat with a recruiter. I chose to skip most of the “popular” companies and target ones with reasonable wait time.
I quickly assessed the list of booths that I wanted to visit and started making my rounds. When you approach a booth at a career fair, you will be asked to fill out some introductory form so that recruiters can keep track of everyone they spoke with. Then you’ll speak with someone representing the company. During that brief chat, they will collect your resume. Lastly, you will be asked to actually go ahead and apply for a specific role at that company.
To my pleasant surprise, I got a call back from a Deere recruiter, at about 10 PM that same evening, asking me to interview on campus at 8 AM the following day. Great. Good thing I had my suit and fresh copies of resumes ready to go.
Deere moved quick. The following week I was flying to Deere headquarters in Moline, IL for the rest of my interview rounds. Meanwhile the rejections from other companies started to hit my email inbox. Although most companies from that career fair rejected me, a couple did ask me to interview when it was already too late. At that point I have already accepted an offer with Deere for my first ever summer internship.
