I am officially in my 4th year at Bulacan State University. That means it is OJT season, the final boss of my BSIT degree. But instead of just polishing my resume, linking my GitHub, and feeling confident about my portfolio, I am sitting here looking at job boards thinking: what the f*ck should I do?
I do not want to sound like some LinkedIn tech guru giving a masterclass on "adapting to the future." I am not. I am a 22-year-old student who is genuinely stressed out because the entry-level game completely changed while I was busy studying for it.
The Bare Minimum is Sky High
Three years ago, knowing how to build a full-stack CRUD app with Laravel and Vue was a flex for a student. Now it is literally the bare minimum.
I can open Cursor right now, drop a single prompt, and get a working Next.js boilerplate connected to a PostgreSQL database with Tailwind styling in under two minutes. I know this because I do it for my own freelance projects.
That stack, Laravel, Vue, basic CRUD, is actually what got me hired as an Associate Web Developer at Golden Minds Colleges back when I was still in Senior High. I was a student and I landed a real job because knowing how to build those things was genuinely valuable at the time. Now I am in college, with more experience than I had then, and somehow the bar feels harder to clear.
Companies know this too. They are not hiring interns to write basic syntax or fix simple UI bugs anymore. The tasks that used to be handed to juniors to help them learn the ropes are gone. AI agents handle them instantly. So what exactly is an intern supposed to do now?
The Clone Wars of Portfolios
Because the requirements are higher, the competition is ridiculous.
Getting noticed in the first place feels like a lottery. Every single IT/CS student applying for these roles has the exact same tech stack. We all know React. We all use Tailwind. We all hook up Firebase or Supabase to a frontend.
I spent months building EchoVax, a patient intake system with voice-to-text features. I built CineMatch using the TMDB API. But in an inbox of 500 applicants, how does a recruiter know I actually architected those systems, rather than just asking Claude Code to spit out the repo?
ATS platforms and recruiters are heavily filtering out standard web apps because they assume AI wrote them anyway. So now I have to prove I can think in systems, not just type code. Cool. Great. How?
A Rant, Not a Guide
Here is what makes it even more frustrating. I am not starting from zero. I spent nearly three years as an Associate Web Developer at an actual institution. I founded a product. I led a five-person capstone team building a real clinical system. Build multiple projects for clients.
And I am still getting filtered out by ATS platforms before a human even reads my name.
I keep seeing posts telling students to "just become AI engineers" or "build multi-agent clusters." I am already doing that. I am integrating AI into my workflows. I am proposing digital scaling roadmaps to local businesses in Bulacan. But the system does not care. It sees a student email and a graduation year and moves on.
That is the part nobody talks about. It is not just about skill anymore. It is about convincing a broken hiring pipeline that you are worth a second look, and doing that while also finishing your degree, building your capstone, and trying not to lose your mind.
Figuring It Out in Real Time
There is no neat conclusion here. I am not going to pivot to farming or drop out. I love building web apps and making systems around AI too much to quit tech.
But hunting for an internship in the middle of this AI boom feels like trying to board a high-speed train while it is already moving. I am just sending out applications, trying to deeply understand system architecture, and hoping a company takes a chance on someone who actually wants to understand the code, not just prompt it into existence.
It is a massive grind. And right now, I am just trying to survive it. Maybe soon I will finally land my first internship in software engineering. That would be nice.