Gen Z grad landed internship by wearing American University cap to pizza joint job. Now she works at Cisco.

Internships were poised to be a solution to this conundrum, but as one American University student soon found out while trying to bag work experience, nowadays it’s hard to even land a role fetching coffee for corporate executives.

“I was a first-gen college kid utterly perplexed by the internship paradox—I needed experience to land an internship, but I couldn’t get experience without one,” Ayala Ossowski, who has just turned 24, tells Fortune.

But after hearing crickets from over 100 applications, she decided to resort to unusual networking methods.

The Gen Zer was already working 20 hours a week at a pizza shop in suburban Washington DC, or as she puts it, “one of the wealthiest, most influential neighborhoods in the world”.

Being face-to-face with powerful people while she served them a slice got her thinking: “Why can’t these people give me a job?”

“The barrier I realized was that all they saw was the girl who was giving them pizza,” she adds. “I needed to give them a reason to look at me as a potential employee.”

That’s when Ossowski decided she was going to start wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with her university logo on the front to every shift. 

“I needed to give myself some sort of credential right off the bat, that tipped off to them that I was studying,” she adds.

It only takes one person to notice you

Just as Ossowski predicted, the baseball cap was a conversation starter. 

Instead of making painful small talk while they waited for their pizza order, customers were looking at the hat’s logo and asking: “Oh, American University, do you go there?” 

They were probably being polite and didn’t anticipate much of a response, but anytime Ossowski was asked about the hat she’d launch into her elevator pitch. 

“Yep, I’m a student there studying public relations and marketing,” she recited her rehearsed lines.

“I’m actually currently looking for an…