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.
How do you explain it? You tell them the truth. If that truth isn’t good enough for admission, you ask them what you need to have in your recent history to get accepted, and then when they tell you, you go do that thing.
If their admissions aren’t satisfied by whatever the truth is about your situation, then the program wouldn’t be a good fit for you anyway.
“the job market is so fucked up so but I’ve done a lot of open source work, here’s my Github”
