Observations from Interviewing and Hiring our 2026 College Interns
• By Andrew , Co-Founder & CEO
Ever since my co-founders and I started our careers, we have been directly involved in hiring College Hires and Interns. These positive experiences coupled with the fact that college students bring recent experience applying to Universities, we felt it was important for AdmitRadar to have an internship program and brought in our first set of interns in 2025. After wrapping up our Internship Recruiting for 2026, we had requests from candidates for constructive feedback that might help them should they apply to one of our internships in the future or as they consider other positions which prompted this post.
Our Approach to Reviewing Candidates
We wanted to provide a more personalized experience to our applicants and thus my co-founders and I personally reviewed applications directly without the use of AI–we appreciated our candidates patience as we went through this more time-consuming process. For us, it helped us identify two exceptional candidates that will be joining us this coming summer.
Observation #1: AI Seems to be Impacting Entry-level Jobs
As a startup, we received a greater number of applicants than anticipated from the schools that we posted the job to on Handshake. For our Data Science position, we had over 480 candidates and for our Software Engineering role, just over 430. Of the candidates that applied, a number of them were Graduate Students and even some that were graduating this coming May. While some candidates communicated that they were excited to apply for a Startup and work directly with our Chief Technology Officer, we do also know that the number of candidates is reflective of the current College Hire Market. The candidates that thoughtfully reviewed our job description and tailored their resumes and cover letters stood out.
Observation #2: There is an Impressive Pool of Candidates
Not only did we have students with published research papers, academic excellence and significant work experience but our finalists also included a Division 1 athlete, a candidate that won three hackathons, a student with prior Big 4 consulting experience and a candidate that worked directly with the government data sets that we use for our products. Had we used AI to sort through our pool of candidates, I am not sure we would have identified our final candidates.
Observation #3: The Best Resumes Balance Relevant Project and Work Experience
What seems to have differentiated our finalist candidates were resumes that had a balanced project section highlighting experience relevant to the specific job we posted along with real-world work experience that demonstrated a level of critical thinking, problem solving and leadership competencies. They also had relevant metrics backing up the impact the applicant had in the roles they held. While there is no cookie cutter approach, their resumes expressed their interests, passions, success and experience and left the reviewer wanting to learn more in an interview.
Observation #4: There Seem to be Varying Degrees of use of AI amongst the Candidates
During the interviews, it became apparent that a number of our interviewees have been utilizing AI for much of their coursework while others were very balanced in their use of AI. Those with balanced use understand the benefits it offers, but also make sure to learn the critical course material while AI supplements their education. Some students that we met were excited about OpenClaw while not fully understanding the security implications of the platform. It also seemed that a few of our candidates were even using OpenClaw, Claude Co-work and other such products to apply for our job and interact with us based upon the mis-cues or lack of responses that we received to invitations to interview with us. Since we knew that companies are not always communicative during the hiring process, we tried to be as transparent as possible with our candidates and were disheartened when our communications went unanswered.
Observation #5: Interpersonal Skills are a Differentiator
At the end of the process, it seems the top candidates that we moved forward through our process not only had impressive Technical Skills, were excellent students and had very relevant project and work experience, but they also were engaged students exceptional in organization, follow-through and communications through the entire process. They were also passionate about their interests which came through in their resume and also interviews.
Conclusion
We are excited to have two excellent interns joining us this summer who we believe will add great value while also learning from our team. We hope that companies continue recognizing and investing in the value and unique perspectives found in college students because the pool of candidates is truly impressive! For us with a lean startup, we believe that it was well worth investing the time to bring in this next level of talent to work directly with our Chief Technology Officer and Chief Data Scientist.