At first, I was very unsure of what I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time applying to really competitive software/quant jobs at finance firms. I mainly did this because I felt pressure to come home (NY).
I then wasted a lot of time applying to data science roles with experience requirements that were out of my range. I am good at Python, SQL, feature engineering, and stats for an undergrad (I think), but these jobs all wanted 2+ YOE. I thought that I might make it with my math background. I was also panicking about the lack of entry level positions I was seeing. I had a terrible go of it and it really shot my confidence. I had the two onsites during this period.
Now there are more entry level positions and I've been applying for lots of data/software engineering positions. I've applied to maybe 20 places in the past month and gotten 3 interviews. All 3 are at companies that a few months ago I thought had zero interest in me.
I am also about to start searching outside of my home city (NY) because that was a stupid constraint to put on myself in the first place.
I do worry that my resume is not as strong as others due to only having one internship and projects. I've been working on a few projects to jazz things up, but progress is slow because I have this terrible excel job at the moment. I was thinking a bootcamp would be a good way to work on projects with less of a gap on the resume. That is probably the wrong reason to go for one because it is mainly about the optics...