How to apply for a software house internship in Pakistan

Apply between March and May for a summer place, send a one page CV with a link somebody can click, and use the company's own application form if it has one. Most of the outcome is decided before anyone reads your email: whether a slot is open, whether you applied early enough to be in the pile, and whether there is any evidence on the page that you have built something.

The summer window closes earlier than you think

Students apply when their exams finish. Companies decide who they are taking weeks before that. Those two facts are the whole problem.

Do not wait for an advertised vacancy either. Plenty of software houses here never post one, and take interns because somebody asked at a moment when there was work to hand out.

Where to send it, in order of what works

1. The company's own form or careers page. If it exists, use it and only it. Emailing around a form signals that you did not look.
2. A careers or HR address published on the site. Not the sales address, and not a personal Gmail you found somewhere.
3. LinkedIn. Apply to the actual post. A connection request with two lines of context is fine; ten identical ones are not.
4. A referral. A senior who works there, a teacher who knows the founder. The strongest route by far, and the one students under use because it feels like cheating. It is not, it is how most hiring works.

Never send one email addressed to twelve companies. It is the easiest thing in the world to spot and to delete.

A one page CV when you have no work history

The blank experience section is what makes people panic, and panic produces a page of adjectives. Reorder the page so what is true about you comes first.

Projects go above education, because education is the one thing every other applicant also has. One page, exported as PDF, named ayesha-siddiqui-cv.pdf rather than cv final final 2.pdf. A photo is not disqualifying here, but it costs space you do not have.

Be strict about skills: assume you will be asked to explain anything you list by someone who uses it daily. Two you can defend beat eight you cannot.

A GitHub link beats every adjective on the page

Whoever reads your CV gives it under a minute. In that minute, "passionate, hardworking, quick learner" carries no information, because no CV anywhere says the opposite. A verified link to your GitHub profile (and taking advantage of free tooling like the GitHub Student Developer Pack) is checkable, and being willing to be checked is the primary signal looked for across software houses registered with P@SHA (Pakistan Software Houses Association).

What makes a repository worth linking:

• A README saying what it is, what it uses, and how to run it. Most student repos have none, so three paragraphs puts you ahead of the pile.
• It runs. Somebody may clone it, and they will not ask you for the undocumented variable it needs to start.
• Commits spread across days, not one called "initial commit" holding the whole project.
• A live URL if it can be deployed, and no node_modules or real API keys in the history.

Two small finished projects beat one abandoned ambitious one. A to do API with authentication, tests and a README says more than a half built social network, because the boring one proves you can finish.

If you have nothing to link, that is a weekend problem, not a career problem. Our free courses will get you the ground work, the full stack web track included, but they end in an exam and a certificate, not a portfolio piece. The thing you put on the CV has to be something you built yourself afterwards, and you have to be able to talk about the parts you wrote rather than the parts you copied.

The email

Five things belong in it: which track, one line about why this company, what you have built, when you are available, and a PDF CV attached. The rest is noise.

Subject: Internship application: Frontend, June to July, Ayesha Siddiqui

Hello,

I am a final year Computer Science student at [university] in
Pakistan, applying for a frontend internship. I am free from 1 June
and can work full time until 31 July.

Your team builds mostly in React and Next.js, which is what I have
been working in. The most relevant thing I have made is a bus
timetable site my department uses to check routes before class:
github.com/ayeshas/campus-timetable

My CV is attached, one page. If a short task is part of your process,
I am happy to do one.

Thank you for your time,
Ayesha Siddiqui
+92 300 1234567

Leave out your matric percentage, the paragraph hoping the email finds the reader in the best of health, a folder of six certificates, and any mention of pay. The right moment to ask about money is when somebody has said they want you.

One practical thing: a scanned CV can run to several megabytes, and large attachments get stripped or bounced by some mail systems. Compress it first, with our PDF compressor or anything else. A CV that never arrived looks the same as no CV at all.

What happens after you send it

It lands in a shared inbox or a list of form submissions. Somebody, usually an engineer rather than a recruiter, skims it in a batch with thirty others, often weeks later. If it survives, you get a short call to check you are real and free on the dates you claimed. Many companies then send a small timeboxed task: build one page, fix one bug, write one script. Then a conversation about your project, where the question is almost always "why did you do it that way".

From send to answer is anywhere between three days and a month. The most common outcome, by a wide margin, is nothing.

Why most applications are ignored

The silence is usually structural rather than a verdict on you.

• There is no slot. The most common reason by far. A team of twelve can supervise two interns, not twenty.
• No CV attached, or a Drive link demanding an access request. Nobody is requesting access.
• The CV carries no evidence, only self description.
• The track does not exist there. A company building ERP systems will not invent a game development internship.
• The dates do not work. You want two weeks in August, they run monthly blocks from June.
• The wrong company name is in the greeting. It ends the review instantly.

One more, and it is uncomfortable. At most small software houses, reading intern applications is unpaid overhead squeezed between client deliverables, done quickly by someone who would rather be writing code. Good applicants get missed. That is not a reason to give up, it is a reason to make the first ten seconds do real work, and to apply to six companies properly rather than sixty carelessly.

Follow up once, about ten days later, in the same thread, three lines long. Then let it go and write the next one.

How this works with us, and where we will disappoint you

We run free internships in Pakistan, unpaid but with no fee of any kind, in tracks including MERN, frontend, backend, AI and machine learning, Python automation, mobile, UI and UX, digital marketing, WordPress and database engineering. Applications go through the form on the internships page, which is faster than email because it reaches the person who reviews them. Pick one track, not four: four says you have not chosen.

Now the parts that do not flatter us. We do not have open places every month. We will not certify work that did not happen or dates you did not serve. Finishing our free courses entitles nobody to a place; it helps only because it leaves you something to show, which is true of any project. And if you apply for a technical track with nothing built in that area, we will usually pass, because one short block is too little time to start from zero.

Ours are unpaid, and we would rather say so here than let you find out later. There is no stipend and no salary. What there is: real project work, code review from working engineers, a free certificate, and no fee of any kind at any point. If you need paid work this summer, apply somewhere that pays, and do it early. Wherever you apply, ask about money during the process and get the answer in writing, because a company that will not put it in writing is telling you something.

Current tracks and the application form are on the internships page.