I started my Masters in Spring 2020 as an international student and am currently looking for Summer 2021 internships in the USA. Prior to this, I worked for ~3 years in one of India's largest fin-tech startup.

Since August, I have applied to lots of internship positions. I believe that I have a decent profile and should be qualified enough for internship positions at most of these companies. For quite a few of these applications, I haven't heard back anything from the company, and for lots of companies I have got a direct rejection mail and for a handful of these, I got an online assessment(OA) round. Sadly, I have received a rejection even after doing well in the OA. In nutshell, I haven't got a chance for a telephonic interview in a single company.

Based on the above, I have a few questions which I believe many other students might also have.

• Am I the only one who is in this situation or are students, in general, are seeing fewer conversions this year?

• Is the hiring process impacted because of COVID, US elections(due to future H1B considerations), economic slowdown, etc?

• Which aspects have the most impact when the recruiter views my profile/resume? I believe that I would score in terms of past work experience, grades, resume, Linkedin, Github.

• With the volume of applications companies might be receiving, is my profile even reaching in the hands of the recruiter or is it just getting automatically rejected based on Visa status or any other factors?

PS: It is my first post here, so apologies if I might have overseen any community rules.