[D] Burnout from the hiring process

I’ve been interviewing for research (some engineering) interships for the last 2 months, and I think I’m at a point of mental exhaustion from constant rejections and wasted time.

For context, I just started my master’s at Waterloo, but I’m a research associate at one of the top labs in Europe. I have been doing research since my sophomore year. I did not start in ML, but over the last year and a half, I ended up in ML research, first in protein design and now in pretraining optimization.

I started applying for interships a few months ago, and after 10+ first-round interviews and endless OAs, I haven’t landed any offers. Most of the companies that I’ve interviewed with were a mix of (non-FAANG) frontier AI companies, established deep tech startups, research labs of F100 companies, a couple non name startups, and a quant firm. I get past a few rounds, then get cut.

The feedback in general is that I’m not a good “fit” (a few companies told me I’m too researchy for a research engineer, another few were researching some niche stuff). And the next most common reason is that I failed the coding technical (I have no issue passing the research and ML theory technical interviews), but I think too slow for an engineer, and it’s never the same type of questions (with one frontier company, I passed the research but failed the code review) and I’m not even counting OAs. Not a single one asked Leetcode or ML modelling; it’s always some sort of a custom task that I have no prior experience with, so it’s never the same stuff I can prepare.

I’m at a loss, to be honest. Every PhD and a bunch of master’s students in our lab have interned at frontier companies, and I feel like a failure that, after so many interviews, I can’t get an offer. Because of my CV (no lies), I don’t have a problem getting interviews, but I can’t seem to get an offer. I’ve tried applying for non-research and less competitive companies, but I get hit with “not a good fit.”

I have 3 technicals next week, and tbh I know for a fact I’m not gonna pass 2 of them (too stupid to be a quant researcher) and the other is a 3rd round technical, but from the way he described it I don’t think I’ll be passing it (they’re gonna throw a scientific simulation coding problem at me). And I still need to schedule one more between those 3, but I’m not sure why they even picked me, I don’t do RL or robotics research. After so many days and hours spent preparing for each technical only to get cut, I mentally can’t get myself to prepare for them anymore. It’s always a new random format.

I’m severely burned out by this whole process, but time is running out. I love research, but I’m starting to hate the hiring process in this industry. Any advice on what to do?