It's a little early to be applying for roles with a December/January start date IMO. It's bordering on a little late to be applying for summer internships this year. If I were you, I'd go grind out 100 internship applications right now. An internship remains the best path to a job after graduating, companies will extend offers at the end of summer to the interns they like. Otherwise, you will want to start looking seriously at applying in July or August. Note that by the time November rolls around, nobody wants to do hiring because they're taking time off for holidays, budgets are spent, yearly planning is setting up head counts and budgets for January, etc. Smaller companies are a good target because they get lower application volumes, but they're hard to find. They often only have budget for one major job posting site, so you need to be searching several sites (linkedin, indeed, dice, etc.). In this market you need to be casting a very wide net. You can always pivot tech stacks later, it can be hard but it's solvable. "Unemployed for a year after graduating" however is much harder to solve.