I wouldn't put the blame on visa issues. Facebook, Dropbox and Microsoft (dunno about Quora) are very happy to apply for J-1 visas for interns -- every year, 50

I wouldn't put the blame on visa issues. Facebook, Dropbox and Microsoft (dunno about Quora) are very happy to apply for J-1 visas for interns -- every year, 50-100 students from my university (University of Warsaw) get J-1 visas and go to the US for internships. Most go to NVIDIA, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, but I also know handful of people who were at Dropbox and Palantir, and it seems that one person goes to Quora this year. Maybe with applicants from Egypt it's harder, but I wouldn't bet on that. Your resume looks better than CVs of some of my friends who actually got jobs at the companies you mention, at least from what I can see. It's not the cover letter either -- cover letters are not necessary for Google, Facebook, Dropbox, or NVIDIA, as far as I can tell. My personal guess is that you just had bad luck. Try again and don't give up.