If I undestood well what you are trying to say, your comment about jquery and css is a bit worrying, because it implies you think jquery is a visual effects lib

If I undestood well what you are trying to say, your comment about jquery and css is a bit worrying, because it implies you think jquery is a visual effects library, while it's much more than that and by avoiding it you are probably just missing the point of using it. DOM manipulation fax exceeds stuff that is considered a cool effect you can replicate with css3. Maybe you just worded it badly, but even if, it still doesn't look good. The above can be one reason why you probably missed some internships, but nothing is lost. If you want to progress you should refocus a bit on acquiring more general knowledge about, well, how sausage is made, and from there take a path towards the stuff you really want to do. I'm not implying you don't know any of this, just saying that "My strongest suits are CSS3, HTML, JS" isn't a great selling point for a hire, and from my personal experience with people I had to work with on projects, coders that market themselves as 'html/css guys' aren't really that great at actually helping me build websites. Why, you ask? Because working strictly on decorating front-end doesn't give you the experience of how products are developped in the long term, and it really narrows your point of view on about what you should expect to happen in the process (I'd have some horror stories to share, but that's not the point right now). Second, if I asked you why you used mongo or redis, and why you don't know sql, would you know how to answer so I don't think you just grabbed the latest tech of the week popularity contest winner? Maybe you would, but you should get my point by now - your description of the stuff you can do is weak. You will have more success when you'll be able to convince with certain truthfulness that you know the basics of how web software works, how certain technologies interact with each other, that you have experience with tools, and that you'll be a helpful pair of hands willing to learn and not an obstacle - selling as a css magician just doesn't do that. To get experience, you probably need that awesome internship, but to get that internship, you have to convince your employee that you have done your homework. Before you are a rails-sinatra-ruby-mongo-redis-jquery programmer who prefers tech A over tech B because X and Y, you are a programmer. Are you? If yes, tell it. If not, start working on being one. > My current internship is working exclusively with these Tell them you'd like to expand your experience. Ask them to move you to work a bit closer to the backend guys if it's possible. Even if it doesn't happen right now, they will know you want to progress and not just sit there.