Hey StackOverflow-ers,
I'm a student in software engineering in Montreal. For the last 3 years I've had a few interships (once per year). The first two (in the same company) were mostly sysadmin jobs, but I did get to do a few Perl programs (mostly log file analysing and statistics generation).
My other intership was in the IT security field. I did a huge CGI Perl script to analyse time spent by users on the Internet.
The thing is, what I really want to do is programming, but my interships were mostly sysadmins jobs with some programming (due to my previous experience with Linux and UNIX).
I have another internship this winter, however I would like it to be in the OO programming field, and SW engineering.
I have a background in system administration but I know OO quite well, due to my college courses and projects (C++, Java, VB.NET, ASP.NET, but not C# unfortunately :( ).
My question is this : how can compete, in interviews, having no previous work experience in the OO field (though I build some projects in Java, Swing, etc., and am learning JSP right now), with other students with OO experience in previous interships?
What should be my "selling points" ? I consider myself quite a good programmer, but my previous interviews didn't turn out well due to my lack of experience. In fact, I got an intership last winter in system administration, since, well... that's my background!
Any tips on how to convince a potential employer that I am the perfect candidate despite my lack of professional experience (but lots of personal knowledge (and interest)) ?
Thank you,
Guillaume.