Succeeding in college means not just being self-disciplined and self-motivated but also being inspired by the people you surround yourself with. At UT, I've had the privilege to interact with some incredibly smart (and astoundingly intimidating) people. Sometimes, I can't help but stare at these individuals in awe, wondering: how is it possible to be so intelligent?

A person who never fails to amaze me is one of my closest friends, Shrey Desai. He's a first-year computer science major - and a few months back, he scored an internship with Microsoft. When he told me this news, I was screaming internally. How does one accomplish such a feat? As a freshman, I always considered myself disadvantaged in the world of internship searching.

So, how did Shrey do it?

Since I've known him, Shrey has always helped me with my own search. He's given me valuable advice about seeking job opportunities and not being discouraged as I do so. Although we're in the same year, he's served as a mentor of sorts. So, I decided to interview him and disseminate the tips that have helped me stay motivated this school year. Check it out:

1. When did you start your internship search?

I started searching for internships throughout September, but I was also on the look out for programs to apply to in the summer.

2. Who/what motivated you to start?

When I was looking for internships last summer, I got back a response from a bioinformatics startup called Transcriptic that said companies tend to hire in the fall even though the actual internship begins in the summer. This prompted me to do some preparation in the summer before college so that I could start applying in the fall and essentially get the internship application process rolling before classwork started to pile up.

3. What methods did you use, and which were the most effective?

I mostly used AngelList to find positions at startups and LinkedIn for bigger companies. While I did fill out the online applications, I also cold emailed some startups to express my interest in working for them. In addition, I was surprised to see that a lot of companies did heavy recruiting on our college campus. In the beginning of the year, there were probably two to three companies each week that held information sessions. Microsoft held two information sessions during which I made contact with a program manager and software engineer, respectively. I felt like this was the best method because it gave me one-on-one time to speak to each representative and sell myself.

4. How many rejections did you get? How did you deal with discouragement?

I got a lot of rejections. When I mean a lot, I truly mean A LOT. Throughout the internship process, I kept updating a table on which companies I applied to and what their response was:

I applied to about sixty companies, received interviews from ten, and an offer from one. Companies may deny candidates for many reasons, but technical skills or cultural fit do not have to be one of those reasons. Every time I got an email from a company saying that they weren’t continuing with my application, it actually made me work harder. Since the beginning of the semester, I have made eight versions of my resume and changed the template three times.

5. What was your initial reaction when you heard back from Microsoft? Were you expecting it?

I vividly remember spotting an email notification on my desktop titled “Microsoft Interview Results.” Once I saw “Congratulations!!!”, I bolted out of my chair and started fist pumping in the air for a good five minutes. Luckily, I was alone in my dorm room so nobody had to witness my overwhelming excitement. I didn’t expect it at all, but I was extremely happy with the outcome.

6. Describe the interview process. How difficult was it?

The interview process was lax and stressful at the same time. Microsoft gave their candidates an all-expense paid trip to Redmond, Washington, where the on-site interviews were to be conducted. I was put up in a fantastic hotel in Bellevue, which amusingly had a personal treadmill, yoga mats, and multiple hand weights.

I thought the interviews were challenging. Prior to the on-site interviews, I spent a week reviewing common technical, behavioral, and design questions that Microsoft had asked candidates in the past. At the end of the week, I had exhausted a list of about 100 questions.

Especially for me – a first-year undergraduate that had not taken advanced computer science courses – the technical nature of the interviews was especially daunting. To top it all off, coding on a whiteboard made me even more nervous because the interviewer was silently watching and judging me write out a solution to a problem I had never seen in my life.

8. Getting an internship at Microsoft is a huge accomplishment. What do you think worked in your favor? Did you ever see this coming?

With so many students applying to internships, it is extremely important to stand out from the rest of the crowd. What gets someone the position is something that he or she has done outside of what everyone else is doing. While this is easier said than done, this can really make the difference between an offer and rejection letter.

When I went to the first Microsoft campus event, the recruiter said that they mostly look for candidates that have a deeply ingrained interest in technology. I felt like I was doing pretty well on that front – I had interned at a startup the summer before, worked on numerous personal projects, and started an organization called UT Developers.

Even with everything I had done to catch Microsoft’s eye, I was by no means certain that I would eventually land an internship with them. Working at one of the Big Four – Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft – had always been a dream of mine.

9. Now, on to the part we're all wondering about: how do you get such an amazing internship as a freshman? What are your tips?

Steve Jobs once said, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” These four words truly hold the key to success anything you do in life – especially dreams and aspirations that seem far-fetched.

The summer before college, I was a software engineering intern at a startup called Sizzle. Nobody had ever heard of Sizzle despite its peculiar name – it was a company based in Nashville, Tennessee that made recruiting software. I found Sizzle through AngelList, went through two rounds of interviews, and ended up working remotely for three months. The experience I received was far more valuable than any monetary value I could have gotten from other companies.

I also started working on some personal projects on the side. The projects were not anything spectacular – I wasn’t doing groundbreaking research or building industry-level software. I ended up completing a project called Converse; it used the Markov Chain algorithm to randomly generate tweets based on what a person had tweeted in the past. Running Converse on Donald Trump’s tweets was entertaining – it would generate some nonsensical tweets like “From this moment on, it’s going to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will go to D.C. on January 20th. It will be forgotten no longer.”

Lastly, I set up an organization called UT Developers. With a couple of other students, we created a university-wide course search engine and an application to determine how many college credits one could get through his or her Advanced Placement scores. Even today, we continue to develop applications and public APIs for UT.

These are ordinary things that anyone could have done, but not many people do them because it takes a lot of effort and hard work. After all, who would want to spend the whole day in a room coding instead of soaking up the sunshine outside? It was difficult to be reclusive, but I knew that whatever I did could pay off in the end, which it did.

10. What do you think is the most important thing internship-seeking freshmen should remember as they embark on what is doomed to be a tedious journey?

First, don’t compare yourself to others. Yes, when you hear about the people around you getting internships, it’s only human to feel a plunge in self-esteem. When I was interning at a no-name startup, one of my friends was interning at Zynga, a multi-million-dollar company that makes iOS games. Everyone starts from somewhere and eventually progresses upwards, but that initial transition is the most difficult. The more you put yourself out there, the more probable it is that someone will notice you. In high school, it took me 500 emails to research professors to find one position. This year, it took 60 companies to find one internship. Keep on trying and persisting regardless of what other people say – in the end, you’ll have a great story to tell.

Second, seek help. Personally, I like learning from other peoples’ experiences so I can feel more prepared in my endeavors. Read Medium and Quora to find out what interns or people in the industry have gone through in their processes.

Third, take it easy but not too easy. If you don’t get an internship at the end of freshman year, it’s not the end of the world. I know a couple of people that did not have internships their freshman or sophomore years but instead got an amazing internship their junior year and ultimately signed on full-time. What’s more important is what you do in your free time. During the summer, take some online classes, work on personal projects, or develop some new hobbies. Keep yourself busy and occupied because hard work eventually pays off.

If you’re hungry enough to soak up all the knowledge you possibly can and foolish enough to think you can end up interning at the Big Four or Wall Street, I guarantee you can do it.