IIRC, less than 5% of juniors (3rd-years) in my class got internship offers at Google, and Google goes out of its way to fly recruiters to the University of Wat

IIRC, less than 5% of juniors (3rd-years) in my class got internship offers at Google, and Google goes out of its way to fly recruiters to the University of Waterloo every four months. There were basically only two or three kids that got offers as freshmen (1st-years) / sophomores (2nd-years). A much higher percentage of seniors (4th-years) get internship/co-op offers, but it's still not huge. From what I can tell, a lot of recruiting at Google revolves around giving the impression of fairness and due process; trying to hack around it by contacting recruiters directly on LinkedIn sounds like a good way to get black-listed. Apply through their portal at http://www.google.com/about/jobs/students/ http://www.google.com/about/jobs/students/ ; consider working at other companies (e.g. Facebook) to build up your resume if you don't have prior experience; be open to working at other offices; be open to working in multiple areas of the company (for example, it's really hard to get positions in Chrome and Android unless you're Liam Mcloughlin).