How I Got a Job With No Internship and a History Degree

I got hired with no internship and a history degree because I had proof outside the classroom. The degree gave me writing, research, and judgment. The Shopify store gave employers something easier to understand: customer support, marketing, analytics, operations, and ownership.

There is still a tradeoff. A broad degree can make the first job search harder because employers need a clearer reason to take a chance on you. That reason usually has to come from projects, work samples, referrals, or a story that connects your background to the job.

In my case, the store mattered more than a perfect major. It gave me something specific to talk about in interviews and something specific for employers to judge.

If you are in the same spot, pair this story with the no experience and no internships guide, how applicant tracking systems work, and the Getting Hired archive. The move is to give employers something better to judge than your major alone.

There are tradeoffs

Disclaimer over. Let’s get to the point. Toward the middle of my third year of school, the pandemic hit. I’d messed around for my first two summers in college, traveling and experiencing and whatnot, and was planning to get some work experience before I began my fourth and final year.

The world had other plans. Unprecedented plans.

Panic time.

How was I meant to get a job with no internship, and no work experience except for cleaning dishes at a retirement home during high school? That job sucked, by the way.

Luckily, my boyfriend was in the same boat. We’d both f*@ked around and found it. So we started looking for ways to create experience for ourselves. We wanted something that would help us build skills we could point to in a job search.

Selling dog beds. Perfect.

Kidding, but not really. We decided to create a Shopify store. To make it work, we had to learn marketing, social media, customer support, finance, web design, and a bunch of tiny things nobody puts in a syllabus. Our first product was dog beds, which flopped. We pivoted to dog toys, which also flopped.

Enough with the dogs. We completely overhauled our website, and began selling K-Pop merchandise, cute water bottles and phone accessories, and clothing. This stuck.

We ended up making well over $20,000 in three months. The money was awesome, duh, but something even better came of this experience.

I was hired at a massive Silicon Valley tech startup.

I added this Shopify store to my resume, included key statistics and areas that I owned, and linked to our store. Within a week, I got an interview. Within a month, I got a job offer.

Now, I did have other things on my resume too. I graduated from one of the top universities in the world, I was a member of a student club. I did have a little bit of experience with volunteer work as well.

However, I can say with 100% certainty that if I didn’t have this Shopify store on my resume, I would not have gotten an interview.

It doesn’t matter whether your primary motivation is to make money, learn new skills, or pad your resume. Tremendous value can come from a side hustle. Even while still in school, or while working a full time job, finding a fulfilling project and sticking to it will open up doors for you. 

Guaranteed is a strong word. But if you have no internship, a serious project can change how employers read your resume.

What got me the interview

• A real project with real customers, even if the first version failed.
• Clear numbers, including revenue, timeline, and what changed after each pivot.
• Resume bullets that showed ownership instead of just participation.
• A story I could explain in an interview without sounding like I was stretching.

If your resume is getting ignored, it is also worth understanding how applicant tracking systems work. A project helps most when the resume still matches the job well enough to get seen.

This is the kind of context GradSimple Insiders is built to collect: what people tried, what mattered in the room, and what the job post never said.