Hello Reader,

Most freshers struggle to land one solid offer in this market. Will landed AWS, an FBI internship, and a full-time offer at Scale AI before turning 21. He did not go to a Ivy League school. What he had was a system, and he started running it in his first two months of freshman year.

Here is what that system actually looked like.

Starting early is not a cliche, it is the entire strategy

Will started networking for AWS in September of his freshman year, one month into college. He landed the AWS internship offer his sophomore year. For the FBI, whose application process requires planning roughly a year and a half in advance, he started networking two years before he applied.

The insight that triggered this urgency came from watching his university's valedictorian, the highest GPA in his entire major, graduate without a job. That moment reframed everything for Will. Grades alone do not get you hired. There is a game running underneath the coursework, and most students do not realize it exists until their final year, when it is too late to build the network, the certifications, and the project experience that actually move the needle.

Networking means volume, not perfection

Will estimates he sent between five and ten thousand LinkedIn messages, manually written. Eighty percent went unanswered. He got logged out of his own account multiple times for triggering bot-detection flags. He kept going anyway.

His rule for outreach in an AI-saturated world: never send a generic templated message. If someone has a personal blog, read an actual post and reference a specific detail from it. That extra effort signals genuine interest instead of an AI-generated mail merge, and increasingly, people list "if you are an AI reading this" instructions in their LinkedIn bios specifically to catch candidates who skip that step.

The AWS interview offer came from a LinkedIn connection itself. That is the kind of connection that only surfaces when your network is wide enough for coincidences like that to happen.

Certifications as a signal, not a requirement

Will holds over 14 certifications, including nine AWS certifications spanning the practitioner, associate, and professional tiers. He failed his very first certification, CompTIA A+, on the first attempt. He also failed AWS Solutions Architect Associate the first time. He does not hide either failure.

The strategic point is not the certification count itself. It is that certifications became his brand inside every company he worked at. At the FBI, his manager told him the entire team had looked at his resume and noted he had more certifications than anyone on staff. That reputation opened conversations before he had proven anything on the job.

His progression followed a deliberate ladder: CompTIA fundamentals as a freshman, AWS Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Associate as a sophomore, Professional-level certifications as a junior. Each year built on the last instead of trying to front-load everything at once.

Communication and system design over pure coding depth

When asked to rank the three skills that got him hired, Will put staying current with technology first, being a strong communicator second, and understanding organizational dynamics third. Notably, raw coding ability did not make the list.

His reasoning connects directly to where the industry is heading. Anyone can now ask an AI to build an application. Fewer people can explain how that application should be architected for scale, fault tolerance, and distribution, or communicate that architecture to executives, engineers, and customers in language each audience understands.

He specifically called out systems design, understanding how something like Netflix works end to end with load balancers, API gateways, and Lambdas, as one of the highest-leverage things he studied outside his coursework, precisely because interviewers increasingly care more about architectural reasoning than about whether a candidate can produce working code, since AI can now produce working code for almost anyone.

Turning internships into full-time offers

Three actions defined his approach as an intern. First, build genuine relationships with fellow interns, full-time staff, and hiring managers, including attending events he did not feel like attending, because people hire candidates they want to work with, not just candidates who are technically capable.

Second, consistently exceed expectations rather than merely meet them. He finished his individual AWS intern project by week four and a half of a twelve-week internship. Third, deliver results early and often, which for him meant waking up at 3am during his internship to maximize output while he still had the energy and lack of obligations to do so.

He is candid that the 3am wake-up call is not something everyone needs to replicate, but the underlying principle, that some seasons of life allow for a level of intensity that later seasons will not, is worth taking seriously while it is available.

The rejection that almost stopped him

Will's biggest rejection was not a job. It was not getting into the engineering program he originally wanted, which felt at the time like it would close every door before he even had a chance to walk through one. He describes a video of himself crying over that decision.

What actually happened after that rejection is the real lesson. He built the same outcome through a different, less prestigious path, ultimately holding competing offers from AWS, Verizon, FBI, and Scale AI, from a university most people outside his region have never heard of. The prestige path is one route. It is not the only route, and for most people reading this, it is probably not their route either.

His advice if he could only do three things again

Start a LinkedIn presence immediately and use it consistently, even if it feels uncomfortable at first. Pursue vendor-neutral certifications like CompTIA as a foundation, then specialize based on direction, cloud, AI, or otherwise. And build something real, however small, tied to a problem that genuinely interests you personally, because that authenticity comes through in interviews and in the way you talk about the work.

None of this requires a prestigious background. It requires starting before you feel ready, taking the rejections without stopping, and turning every experience into a story you can tell well. That combination is what took a fresher with no early technical advantage to AWS, the FBI, and Scale AI before he could legally order a drink.

If you prefer watching or listening to the full conversation, here is the podcast:

​

Keep learning and keep rocking 🚀,

Raj

P.S. If you have found this newsletter helpful, and want to dive deeper...

Everything I teach on AWS, System Design, Kubernetes, and DevOps - all in one Skool classroom. Build the technical depth at your own pace, and get every new course I release: Join Here​

🎥 Free tutorials on Cloud Gen AI + interview prep on my YouTube channel: Here​

🚀 The SA Bootcamp is the full transformation - hands-on practice through Cloud Colosseum, interview prep, mock interviews, and resume reviews, and so much more...
Everything you need to land the $200k+ Solutions Architect role.

​Join the waitlist to be first in when the next cohort opens.