Getting my first internship before even starting university felt almost miraculous. I was eighteen, taking a gap year, and did not have years of experience, a polished resume, or a long list of impressive projects. At the beginning of that year, I mostly wanted space away from school to think about what I actually wanted, but I was also afraid of wasting the year. I knew I wanted experience, yet the idea of sending hundreds of applications into a competitive market with a half-built resume did not feel like a very strong strategy.
Someone suggested a different approach: go where people in the industry already are. Around that time, I found a blockchain conference called Rare Evo and decided to attend. I was curious about the space, but I was also extremely uncomfortable walking into a room full of founders, developers, investors, and people who had been working in the field for years. I still went around introducing myself, asking what people were building, and telling them I was looking for somewhere I could contribute. Some of those conversations happened while my legs were genuinely shaking.
Most of those conversations did not lead to jobs. Some gave me advice, some introduced me to technologies I had never heard of, and others helped me understand what I still needed to learn. But one conversation eventually became something much bigger. It led to the people I would work with for much of the following year and eventually to an internship opportunity in Hong Kong.
Looking back, it is easy to call that luck. In many ways, it was. There were countless small things that could have happened differently. But the part I keep coming back to is that I had put myself in a place where that opportunity was possible in the first place. The opportunity itself may have been lucky, but being there, starting the conversation, and asking for a chance were decisions I made.
That experience changed how I think about opportunity. I used to imagine opportunities as things that appeared in front of you: a company responds to your application, someone reaches out, or an opening happens to come along. Now I think opportunities have a kind of geography. They exist around people who are building things, at conferences, in labs, in clubs, during office hours, and in conversations that only happen because you chose to show up.
I also learned that seeking opportunity does not always need to end with getting the thing you originally wanted. A conversation that does not lead to a job can still tell you what to learn next, introduce you to a new field, or show you why you are not ready yet. Once I stopped treating every interaction as “Will this person give me an opportunity?” networking started to feel much more natural. It became a way of understanding where the paths were and how I could prepare myself for them.
My first internship still feels incredibly lucky, but it taught me the difference between waiting for luck and creating more chances for luck to happen. None of these things guarantee an outcome: attending the event, emailing the professor, walking into office hours, introducing yourself, or asking the uncomfortable question. But they increase the number of opportunities you are close enough to notice.
That is the perspective I want to keep carrying forward: be brave enough to put yourself where opportunity happens, and be ready enough to take it when it does.