I've Been Answering the Same DMs for Two Years. This Newsletter Is My Answer to All of Them.
Every year, around August, my inbox fills up.
“Krish, which companies actually sponsor H-1B?” “How did you get a research position as a freshman?” “My GPA is 3.0, is that enough to even apply?” “Did you tell recruiters upfront that you need sponsorship?” “How do you network here? Back home it was completely different.”
I answer every one. Always have. But I’ve been doing it one DM at a time, typing the same things over and over, to students who deserved a better answer than a voice note at midnight.
This newsletter is me deciding to stop doing that.
Everything I know about surviving the US CS job market as an international student, about research, about building real things, about the parts nobody puts on their LinkedIn... I’m writing it here. Publicly. So the next person doesn’t have to wait for a reply.
I’m Krish. A sophomore at The Ohio State University studying CSE, originally from India. Here’s the honest version of my story.
The part about my mom
She cried. I cried. She told me to make her proud, to make our whole family proud. I had never known life without her and I had no idea how I would manage halfway across the world.
Everything I’m doing here, the research, the internships, the sleepless nights at hackathons, has her fingerprints on it. She didn’t get the kind of education she wanted. She made it possible for me to. That’s a different kind of sacrifice, and it’s one I think about more than I let on.
I don’t write about this to be sentimental. I write about it because I think a lot of us carry this weight, and nobody in the “CS career advice” space ever acknowledges it. The pressure isn’t just about getting a job. It’s about making a life that justifies someone else’s faith in you. To prove to them that their sacrifices were not in vain.
What I’ve actually been doing
I’ll save the long version for future posts, but here’s the honest snapshot:
I'm doing AI/ML research at the NSF AI-Edge Institute this summer, working on vision-language models and trying to get published at a top ML conference. I also work at Nationwide Children's Hospital building a conversational AI chatbot for pediatric care navigation. I've won a few hackathons, tried to build my own startup and even built a game with over 10k users.
I'm also President of OSU's Software Engineering Club and VP of the ACM chapter, a combined 500+ members that is somehow my responsibility to keep from falling apart every semester.
None of this came with a manual. Most of it was figuring things out in real time, often wrong the first time.
What this newsletter is actually about
This isn’t a generic ‘how to break into tech’ or ‘here are jobs you should apply for’ newsletter. There are thousands of those.
This is a space for me to share my journey. The reality of being an international student in these trying times, in one of the most saturated fields our generation will ever witness, trying to build something meaningful in a country that wasn't built with you in mind. Navigating visa timelines, sponsor anxiety, cultural whiplash, and imposter syndrome, all while trying to do genuinely interesting technical work.
I’ll write about the career game, the stuff your university’s international office glosses over, the sponsorship landscape nobody maps clearly, the networking norms that took me way too long to decode. The answers to those DMs, written properly.
I’ll write about building, the projects, the hackathons, the side products, the things that worked and the things that quietly died.
And sometimes I’ll just write about what it feels like to be here, doing this, far from home.
Why you should subscribe
The information I needed was scattered across Reddit threads from 2019, YouTube videos with 400 views, and WhatsApp groups where advice ranged from genuinely useful to actively wrong. People told me what to say at my visa interview. Nobody told me what life actually felt like after I landed. People told me to “network” and “talk to professors.” Nobody told me which clubs were worth joining, which events actually mattered, which connections would open doors and which ones were just LinkedIn numbers.
Nobody was writing about this clearly, consistently, and from inside the experience, as someone still living it, not someone looking back from a Google offer five years later.
That’s what this is.
If you’re an international student navigating the US CS path, or thinking about it, this is for you. If you’re someone who finds the intersection of research, building, and figuring out life interesting, I think you’ll find something here too.
Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
And mom, if you ever read this, I’m okay. More than okay.