How did I land my first cybersecurity internship while being a high-school student?

Hi there 👋, I hope you are doing well. On May 17th, 2024, I signed my first internship even before I graduated my high school. This was a way too thrilling experience for me.

So first of all, I’ll share the general story (non-technical) part of this, and then, I’ll move to technical things, like what I knew, my experience, and the kind of résumé thing I sent (it wasn’t a PDF file, but all things written in email)

Thought of internship

I was doing bug bounties for a while, and I wanted to learn more skills, so what could’ve been better than taking an internship? So here started the journey of finding an internship, but before the rocket was even built, I had some doubts about myself.

The biggest question I had, was “Will someone give an internship to a high school guy?”. I saw a video of Ishan Sharma, in which he said: “They rejected me because of my childish voice”. (over telephonic call; for hiring him for marketing,,, as I remember). Yes, it was his first rejection, but fortunately (or maybe unfortunately) not for me. Even though he was rejected at that time, now (at the time of writing this blog), he has 1.3 Million+ subscribers on YouTube, and he also started a marketing company.

This thought was also fueled by another person, Ankur Warikoo. I read his first book Do Epic Shit and in that, a quote was written: “If you never ask, the answer is always No!“. Another topic was there in that book, and it was related to cold emailing. It described the power of cold-emailing, and also from YouTube videos of other people as well, I learned that people landed at jobs with the help of this.

So, it was time to write the email

Sending out emails

The first thing was, to whom will I reach out for an internship? A thought randomly came to my mind, that I had seen an internship opportunity a few months before, though, at that time, I had my exams, so I didn’t apply for it.

It was the time for writing an email, but what will I mention in it? The first thing that came to my mind was the bug bounty experience. This was the only real-life experience I had and for very obvious reasons. Apart from this, I have done some projects on my GitHub, so that’s a great idea to highlight in my email.

So, I quickly drafted an email, mentioning all my previous work in bug bounty, building hacking tools, blogs, etc. Now, it’s time to create a title. From all the videos and other resources I had consumed related to cold emails, I noticed that they all said that the email must have a catchy title. It was important to note that I wrote most of the things in points, and not in long paragraphs (just like this blog) because people generally don’t want to read a long boring, and too formal paragraph from a heap of emails. I made sure that it was easy for me to know maybe ~50% about me within the first few moments of opening the email. To make the person open the email, I needed a good email subject line. So, I started thinking about it, and instantly, got a title: “Can a high school guy get an internship” (maybe I am quick at thinking such things). Now my email draft was looking kinda good.

Also, to maintain professionalism, I decided not to shoot it with my email with the “@gmail.com” domain, but instead shoot it with my work email “[email protected]” (yes, you can contact me here) and also to look kinda ‘cool’.

But I didn’t just shoot the email immediately, instead, scheduled it for Monday morning (I drafted the email on the weekend). The reason for this is very straightforward: most people don’t like to open their work email on weekends (maybe a bug bounty hunter dropped a critical 🤪), and they also to make sure, that when they open their email on Monday, my email will appear fairly on the top of their inbox (as most of the email providers show latest emails first).

I combined all these tricks with perfect timing, my email was sent out to the founder

Also, if you are thinking why I didn’t message him regarding this on LinkedIn or X, the reason is that, on those platforms, it is very easy for a message to get lost in messages from other people. Also, there’s nothing to distinguish (other than the user who sent the email) like the subject in the email. If I sent a message on that platform, he would see “Hi there, I hope you are doing well. I am ….” and it’s not at all interesting.