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On May 24th, Palm Avenue celebrated its 11th anniversary with a study abroad event held smoothly in seven cities, like Beijing and Chengdu. Drill Insight, as a close partner, joined the event and shared lots of practical tips and the latest job market updates for international students planning to study and work in North America. The goal was to help students plan their study and career paths more clearly. At the event, Drill Insight’s co-founders Zack and Chelsea gave some really useful talks. Zack has years of experience working at major Silicon Valley tech companies and has conducted over 500 interviews, so he knows exactly what these companies look for. Chelsea has studied and worked in Australia, New Zealand, and North America, including at Big Four accounting firms and big multinational companies. She focuses on helping international students land jobs in tech and finance and has helped over 5,000 students get job offers they’re happy with. During their talk, they used the latest stats from the U.S. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that jobs in software development, AI, and data science will be in high demand over the next decade, so these are great fields for students to focus...

As the 2025 application season nears, Drill Insight teamed up with PalmDrive to host a seminar on May 16, 2025 (Beijing time), focused on study and career planning for students going to North America. Mentors from top Silicon Valley companies shared their experience to help students prepare for their job search and career path. With student visa policies stabilizing and the U.S. job market improving, studying in the U.S. is becoming more than just education; it’s a key step for career growth. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the chance of getting an H-1B master’s visa in 2026 is expected to reach 50%. STEM majors like computer science and data science have an edge. Many families want to know how to go from getting into a good school to landing job offers at top companies. The seminar was led by Zack, a senior instructor at Drill Insight. He has over 10 years of Silicon Valley experience, has worked as a technical lead, and interviewed candidates for many major tech companies. Zack covered topics like job market trends, timing for job hunting, salary structures at big tech firms, and interview processes. The aim was to help students understand how...

Meta’s latest round of layoffs has sparked a lot of discussion in the North American tech world. For a company that once seemed unstoppable, this shift sends a clear signal: no matter how big you are, you're not immune to economic pressure and internal restructuring. For international CS students looking for jobs in North America, it might feel like the timing couldn’t be worse. But in reality, it’s also a chance to pause and rethink how to approach the job hunt. Layoffs don’t always mean a company is failing. Often, it’s just about adjusting direction, cutting back on less important projects and focusing on areas with more long-term value. For students, this can be a wake-up call to assess whether their skills line up with what companies are hiring for. These days, it's less about writing flawless algorithms and more about whether you can contribute to real-world business goals. That means your project experience, how you write code, and how you work with others—all of that matters more than ever. Some people worry that with fewer openings at big tech companies, the whole market is drying up. But that’s not entirely true. A lot of mid-sized companies and startups are...

Lately, large language models have become a big deal across many industries, and interviews for related roles in North America have gotten more detailed and professional. For international students, besides just technical skills, interviewers really pay attention to your communication, how well you understand projects, and your ability to break down problems. Instead of memorizing canned answers, it’s way better to focus on really grasping the basics and how they fit into real situations. The questions you’ll often get are about how Transformers work — stuff like how Self-Attention actually operates, why we need Position Encoding, and what Layer Normalization does inside the model. Sometimes, interviewers dig deeper and ask how different parts connect, like what the Feedforward layer does or why Residual Connections help train deeper networks. If you only give a shallow answer, they’ll probably keep asking, so knowing the math and reasoning behind it helps a lot. You’ll also get questions about real project experience — like “How did you pick the model for your project?”, “Why choose GPT over BERT?”, or “How do you handle noisy data?” These aren’t about showing off fancy techniques, but about showing you can think through what fits best for the...

More companies in the U.S. are starting to explore large language models—not just big tech firms focused on cutting-edge AI, but also smaller startups and mid-sized businesses. These companies are beginning to look for people who understand how to work with this technology. For international students hoping to enter this field, competition can be intense. That’s why having a clear, focused resume and a few solid projects is more important than ever. A resume doesn’t need to be overly polished or filled with buzzwords. What matters most is that it reflects real experience and thoughtful work. Most hiring teams want to see that you have a grasp of machine learning, deep learning, and especially the currently popular large language model architectures. It helps if you're familiar with models like Transformers or GPT. If you’ve worked on anything like text generation, Q&A systems, or fine-tuned a pre-trained model, take the time to explain what you did, why you did it, and what results you saw. Details matter more than broad claims. Working with data is just as critical. Many projects begin with hours of cleaning and organizing data before modeling even starts. Showing that you’ve handled data preparation, model development, and...

For many international students job-hunting in North America, it quickly becomes clear that good grades or class assignments alone often aren’t enough to impress employers. Especially in roles related to software engineering, data, or product development, recruiters increasingly care about what you’ve actually built—and whether you can deliver a real project from end to end. That’s where a solid full-stack project becomes especially valuable. A full-stack project isn’t just about writing backend logic or building a frontend UI. It’s about designing a complete, working product from scratch—covering everything from the user interface and database, to APIs and deployment. It not only showcases your technical breadth, but also demonstrates that you understand product requirements and can solve real-world problems. Compared to just solving algorithm problems on LeetCode, a functional, hands-on project tends to carry more weight. Many student projects never get beyond the “it runs” stage. But in the real world, hiring managers care about whether your code is clean, whether you’ve thought about the user experience, and whether your design decisions make sense. For instance, if you build a blogging platform with a clean layout, smooth user flow, secure login, and basic safety features, it will stand out far more...

A common question that many international students have as graduation nears is: Can I apply for OPT without a job? This question often comes from concerns about visa status, employment, and timing, especially for IT students, where internship opportunities can be unpredictable and graduation timelines can be tight. From a policy standpoint, OPT doesn’t require you to have a job when you apply. When you're ready to submit your application to USCIS, you don’t need to provide details of a specific employer. As long as you’ve got your I-20 and necessary documents, you can apply even if you haven’t secured a job yet. The purpose of OPT is to offer a legal status for you to search for a job in your field after graduation, not to require you to start work immediately. However, once your OPT is approved and your start date begins, things change. While you can begin your OPT without having a job, there’s a rule that you cannot be unemployed for more than 90 days. So after your OPT officially starts, it's important to find a job quickly. If you don't, your status could be at risk if you exceed that 90-day limit. For IT students,...

Finding a job in North America—it can be easy, or it can be hard. For international students, frontend development may seem like a low-barrier entry point into tech, but truly breaking into the industry and building a solid foundation is no small feat. Technical skills are the baseline, but writing a few lines of code alone won’t make you stand out. If you want to thrive, you need to think more comprehensively about your career path. When it comes to skills, everyone knows you have to master HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—there’s no way around that. But in practice, just knowing the syntax isn’t enough. You need to understand how to structure a page, style it cleanly, handle user interactions—and do all of it efficiently. Frameworks like React and Vue are frequently mentioned in interviews, with React being almost standard in North American job markets. It can feel confusing at first—state management, component lifecycles—they're not exactly intuitive. But once you’ve done a few projects, they start to click. One thing many people overlook is the value of project experience. In fact, it’s often the most convincing part of your resume. Class assignments are fine to include, but if you can show...

International students studying computer science in the U.S. often wonder if software engineers focus on frontend or backend development. The answer really depends on the company. Big tech companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon usually have separate roles for frontend and backend engineers. If you look at their job listings, you'll see titles like "Frontend Engineer" or "Backend Engineer." Each role focuses on different tasks: frontend engineers work on the user interface (UI), often using tools like React and TypeScript, while backend engineers handle servers, databases, and APIs with languages like Python, Java, or Go. But at smaller companies or startups, things can be different. These companies usually prefer developers who can work on both the frontend and backend. Even if the job title is just "Software Engineer," you might need to take on tasks from both areas, such as working on the UI and also handling the backend. If you're more experienced in one area, this could be tricky, so flexibility and adaptability are important at these companies. Many international students don’t know right away which part of development they enjoy more. You might start out working on one side, only to find you enjoy the other. Some people...

I started preparing for Meta’s campus recruitment interviews while I was pursuing my Master’s in Computer Science in North America. The entire process had three main parts: an initial HR screen, a technical phone interview, and a final round with several back-to-back interviews. I got referred by an alumnus, and the first two rounds were done in about two weeks. The HR round was pretty straightforward. It was more like an intro chat where the recruiter explained the role, asked about my career goals, whether the position matched what I was looking for, and a bit about my background. I felt this part was mainly for them to see if I had genuine interest in Meta and understood the role well. To prepare, I practiced my self-introduction a few times, focusing on clearly explaining my project experience and how my working style fit Meta’s culture. For example, I mentioned my time working on a fast-paced startup project, and how I enjoy independent thinking and quick trial-and-error approaches. The technical phone interview was conducted on CoderPad and lasted 45 minutes. I was given one array problem and one tree problem, both around medium to slightly hard LeetCode level. I noticed that...

For international students prepping for tech interviews in North America, picking between LeetCode's English and Chinese versions isn't straightforward. I've been through this dilemma myself, and trust me, the choice really matters - it can make or break your interview performance. Both platforms have their perks, but which one works best depends entirely on where you're at in your coding journey. The English version (leetcode.com) is basically the gold standard for cracking Silicon Valley interviews. Having used it extensively, I can confirm many interview questions come straight from this pool - sometimes word for word. What really gives it an edge is how it trains you to think and explain solutions in English, just like you'd need to during actual interviews. My roommate at Stanford swears by it - after three months of daily practice, he went from stumbling through explanations to acing his Google onsite. The Chinese version of LeetCode is suitable for those students who want to quickly improve their algorithmic foundation. The Chinese community is very active. Under almost every question, there are detailed explanations and different solutions. This is especially helpful for students who are just starting to deal with algorithm problems or are not yet...

For international students in the U.S., OPT (Optional Practical Training) is a common route to gain work experience. OPT allows students with an F-1 visa to work in the U.S. after finishing their studies. A question many students have is whether they can do unpaid internships during OPT. The main goal of OPT is to help students gain practical experience related to their major. U.S. immigration rules specify that any work done during OPT must be paid. Unpaid internships don’t meet this requirement because they don’t guarantee meaningful work or follow OPT rules. If the internship doesn’t relate to the student’s field or doesn’t offer payment, it might not count as valid OPT work. Some students might think about doing unpaid volunteer work or internships at non-profit organizations. While this is possible, the work must still relate to the student’s academic field and meet the specific rules for non-profits. A non-profit role can qualify for OPT, but it must have an educational purpose, not just free labor. The core requirement for OPT is that the work must be paid and related to the student’s academic background. Most companies are familiar with these rules, so students should ensure their internships meet...