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.