Top company internships certainly HELP, but you are really aren't that far behind if you don't get them.

Getting a job right out of college is hard. Everyone is looking for a year of experience.

But once you get that FIRST job, things are smooth sailing. I never got recruitment message in college, but after I had graduated, and was working for a year, I starting getting multiple every week.

Top company jobs, are of course awesome. But if you don't get them right out of college, you can pretty easily do it after a year or 2 of working in the industry in SF.

You can always reach out to companies yourself.

I graduated from a second-tier university in a small eastern-european university and did find internship opportunities in SV so I can assert with confidence: your options are what you make of them with your own skills, aptitude and attitude.

I didn't manage to land any interviews at "top" companies when I was in college, but I think that was largely because I applied way too late (apparently for companies like Google,FB, etc, you need to apply by like November of the year before for internships). However, I do know other people who managed to get Amazon, Microsoft, and Google internships even though they didn't interview at our school, so there seems to be some way to get in by applying yourself.

I've heard from one person that they managed to get an interview at FB by first getting an internship at Amazon so you can try that. I suspect this is how I got my interviews (for full time positions though) at Google/FB as well.

Google was at the career fair at my university. I went and talked to them. They said apply online. I did that, did phone interviews and got an internship.

So at least for Google, they don't need to come to your college.

You can apply online to top companies. You won't go nearly as far if you passively wait for opportunity to come to you.