Most people think you need to graduate before doing anything serious in tech. That real experience starts later, once you are ready. I never really believed that. Some of the most formative years as a developer happen much earlier, if you put yourself in the right rooms.
For me, getting into a startup was never about sending applications or filling out online forms. I did not get my role through LinkedIn or by uploading a résumé to some portal. It happened in person, through conferences, hackathons, expos, and random conversations with people who were building things and actually cared.
I remember preparing myself for my first conferences. The first thing that came to my mind was, "Look professional, feel professional." It was about boosting my confidence, especially since I grew up as a shy kid. That was something I had to work on. I bought business casual clothes because I did not want the stereotype of developers wearing random, sloppy stuff. After that, I had the idea to print real business cards with my name, my GitHub, what I mostly work on, and a private email. That was it.
I met founders standing next to their booths, explaining half-finished products with real excitement. I met engineers who were tired but passionate. I met investors and VCs walking around, listening more than they talked. Those conversations were not interviews in the traditional sense, but they mattered more than any formal process I had seen.
Talking to a startup at an expo is an interview by itself, just without the pressure. You talk about what you are building, what they are trying to solve, what excites you, and what does not. You ask real questions. They ask how you think, not what buzzwords you know. It is relaxed, honest, and surprisingly effective.
Working in a startup as an undergrad is not just about getting experience early. It is about learning how things actually work. Not in theory or slides, but in production, with real users and real consequences.
Big companies teach structure. Startups teach judgment.
In large organizations, especially banks or enterprise tech, everything is designed to reduce risk. Roles are clearly defined, processes are strict, and decisions go through many layers. That is not a bad thing. It is just not where learning is fastest when you are starting out.
In a startup, you are not insulated. If something breaks, you feel it. If a feature is confusing, you hear about it. If a decision was wrong, the impact shows up quickly. That feedback loop forces you to grow fast.
Ownership changes everything
Ownership in a startup is concrete. Your code ships. Your decisions matter. You are not just assigned tasks. You are responsible for outcomes.
You start thinking beyond syntax. You ask whether something is worth building now, what happens if it fails, and whether it is good enough to ship today. That shift from writing code to owning decisions is one of the most valuable things you can learn early.
In school, you choose a specialization. Frontend, backend, mobile, or AI. In a startup, you work on whatever needs to be done. One day you are fixing an API bug. The next day you are looking at logs, tweaking deployment configs, or trying to understand why cloud costs increased.
Infrastructure stops being abstract. Databases stop being just SQL. Scalability stops being a buzzword and becomes a cost decision. You learn how systems behave in the real world, under load, under pressure, and with imperfect constraints.
Startups also force you to make hard decisions.
Do you ship fast or clean it up? Do you fix tech debt or deliver the feature a client is waiting for? Do you say yes to a request or protect the product direction?
There is rarely a perfect answer. Learning how to make reasonable decisions with incomplete information is a skill that compounds over time. It is not something you get from tutorials or coursework.
You are also close to the customer
In startups, users are not just metrics on a dashboard. They are emails, messages, and calls. You hear confusion, frustration, and sometimes appreciation directly. That proximity changes how you build. You stop optimizing only for elegance and start optimizing for clarity, reliability, and usefulness.
You also learn how to pitch as an engineer.
I learned quickly that you do not need to be a founder to pitch. In a startup, you pitch ideas to teammates, technical decisions to non-technical people, timelines to clients, and trade-offs to leadership. Explaining complex systems in simple terms becomes part of your daily work.
It is uncomfortable, and that is the point
You will feel lost sometimes. You will search constantly. You will break things and fix them. That discomfort is where growth happens. Startups do not teach you how to avoid mistakes. They teach you how to recover from them quickly.
By the time you graduate, you do not just have a degree. You have context, intuition, and confidence. You know how to learn fast, adapt under ambiguity, and deliver when it matters.