Ever since I’ve graduated on September 2022, I’ve not had a job. Maybe a crappy internship, but I wasn’t provided with a ‘certificate’, or letter that proves if I’ve worked for them. That was around October 2022, and I quit voluntarily at the end of January 2023. Since then, I’ve not worked anywhere as a software dev, be it internship or full-time, because the job market is so fucked up in India.
Now, how do I explain this to avail scholarship? I have yet to read other scholarship docs from other countries in Europe, and I’m already shitting solidified blood-clots reading this from the DAAD Helmut-Schmidt announcement document:
a curriculum vitae in reverse chronological order including the date of issue (format: europass, please note: the europass template does not include a date, please add it yourself) with exact information about your studies and practical experience; gaps of three months or more must be explained
(Update: And I just realized that I am an idiot for not reading that this is only for non-STEM folks. Well, it looks to me that DAAD for STEM is also almost the same, with more stringent requirements.)
In my college, there was no research programs - I mean, you know the typical ‘Indian colleges encouraging academic plagiarism’, so I didn’t learn or do shit. And obviously, I have no job experience. I did contribute to open-source from GitLab, a few Ruby gems, a new unknown front-end framework for JS, then Nixpkgs and now Guix, but that’s it. Honestly, I wouldn’t even call it contribution, because only a few patches were merged - most of it was just me interacting with those folks. After that, I’ve done nothing since September 2023, because my laptop broke and there were no spare parts. Maybe a little bit of playing around with Nix and Guix, writing package expressions and that’s it.
How do I explain this? CVs are supposed to be at least 2-3 pages, but this? I can’t even write half a page with this.
I worried about this a lot back after uni, too.
I studied 8 years for a diploma that was supposed to be done in 5, and I had done nothing with the extra time. I just wasn’t in a good place to be done any faster.
However, it turns out to just not be a problem. Companies generally could not give a flying fuck about what I did at university, and as soon as I had been at one company, they only cared what I had done before in the industry.
Now of course, going for a masters is different, but I wouldn’t worry too much about it, it probably matters less than you think it will. If you want to explain gaps, I’d just cite it as “personal reasons”. If they ask - which is kinda not-okay - you can always say you had family matters that precluded you from focusing on your studies until now.