A new software engineering job search tool allows computer science students to quickly find and apply for internships.
The tool’s creator, Alex Ruber, studied computer science and math as an undergraduate at UC San Diego and has internship experience at Yahoo, Udemy and NASA. This experience with applying for internships, Ruber said, is what led him and his co-founders Rishi Dhanaraj and Ray Qureshi to create QuickApply.
“We decided that the whole internship process – the whole online job application process in general – is really tedious and time-consuming, and so we just wanted to simplify that,” Ruber said. “You know, we were in that boat when we were college freshmen, and we were applying literally everywhere.”
When students access the tool at quickapply.io, they can view a list of over 100 opportunities, filtered by whether they’re looking for internships or full-time roles.
“We give students the ability to apply to a curated, personalized list of new grad positions or internships with just one form,” Ruber said. “So, without having to repeatedly fill out the same form with your name, email, resume and everything, we make it all in one click along with the supplemental sections that are unique to every company. And you can apply to hundreds of internships in a fraction of the time.”
For a flat fee of $9, students can select the jobs they’re interested in and apply to them all in one step. Software engineering junior Anthony Martinez said the tool significantly simplifies the internship search process by providing only relevant information.
“Typically, students looking for internships related to software engineering will use sites such as Indeed, Glassdoor and Handshake to apply for internships,” Martinez said. “The sites have a lot of information on them which makes them seem cluttered. QuickApply, on the other hand, is the opposite. The only information listed is what the user cares about such as the company, position title, location and hyperlink to the original posting.”
Yet, Martinez said he’d rather not pay the rapid application fee when he can apply to internships manually.
“A major gripe is that it is not a free service,” Martinez said. “I am not willing to pay for this service if I can just apply for free at a slightly slower speed. The way I use the service is just clicking on the hyperlink to the original posting and applying directly on the company’s website.”
The fact that the tool makes it easy for students to apply to dozens of internships at once raises concerns about spamming recruiters, but Ruber said he doesn’t think QuickApply will make that problem any worse than it already is.
“We think that even in the current state, recruiters get tons of indistinguishable resumes,” Ruber said. “We thought we might as well save students some time along the way.”
UTD’s computer science department is one of the largest in the nation, with over 3600 undergraduate students and almost 1000 graduate students. Students often end up finding jobs at places like Google, Amazon and Facebook every year. This put UTD on Ruber’s radar when he was looking for schools to test out his new internship tool.
“Part of our marketing strategy was to look up the biggest CS schools, post on their Reddits and see what happens,” Ruber said. “I was looking up the top computer science schools and [UTD] was one of the best.”
Ruber said that, as someone who was recently in their shoes, he’s committed to improving the internship application process for students everywhere.
“We realized that at the moment, college students looking at internships are confused,” Ruber said. “They’re tired, they’re annoyed at the current online job application process. And so we simplify that.”
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