I lost my job yesterday

First off, let me give you some background. I'm a second-year undergraduate at Yale majoring in Computer Science, and I've been in the bootstrapping/IndieHacking scene for around a year now. Around 4-5 months ago, I landed an offer from a pretty established tech media company (which I will not name for obvious reasons). For me, it was a pretty big deal. It was an absolute grind juggling 4-5 hours of LeetCode per day on top of my classes, problem sets, and side projects. However, after making it through technicals and behaviorals for this one company with a pretty generous offer, it felt like everything had finally paid off.

This was a big deal for me. While I've had experience with full stack engineering positions at startups before, I was excited to finally feel for myself what a large, organized office was like. I had started doing a lot more research on the location and work culture and started to get super hyped over the experience to come.

After returning home for spring break - and staying home due to university coronavirus concerns - I started hearing about canceled internships all over Linkedin and Facebook. My friend had his accounting job canceled, and another had his research internship rescinded. Yet through this whole process, I was confident that my position would maintain in tact because - it's SWE after all! Remote work isn't a problem... right?

Just to be safe, I emailed the company around a week ago asking whether the internship program would be terminated in light of coronavirus concerns. Only one day later, I received an email fully expressing their intent to continue the program whether it be remote or on-site. "Yes!" I thought.

Yet yesterday morning, I received a phone call from an unknown caller. Usually, I would've ignored calls like these since I get a lot of spam, but for some reason I decided to answer this one.

That was it. Internship gone.

They had told me that the company had decided to terminate the internship program this year due to revenue losses that have been caused by the current economic downturn. At first, I didn't believe it. Reality didn't kick in until I received an email confirming the program's demise that same night.

My initial reaction was to start LeetCoding again to find another internship. However, the more I thought about it, the more I started thinking about just using the summer to work on bootstrapping a new side business. As I mentioned previously, I'm fortunate enough to be a college student and have the option of living with my parents. Even if I couldn't gain a formal internship experience this summer, would it be more worthwhile to work on something that would not only set me up for future opportunity, but also may generate income on its own?

At this point, I've slept on the experience, and now I'm pretty much over the initial wave of disappointment and disbelief. I'm excited to start working on my new side project, and will provide updates on it both through IH and Twitter (@wu2153). I'm also very curious to hear if any of you have also lost job positions due to the recent coronavirus economic and social state. How has it affected your life, and how has it affected your bootstrapping?