How did you get your first internship with nothing on your CV?

What worked for me as a career changer with no relevant CV at all:

• Two small projects that solved a real problem for a real person. Mine was a homework tracker my old colleagues actually used. "Someone uses it" beats "it is impressive" every time.
• A README for each that explains what it does, why, and one thing I would do differently. People do read those.
• Applying to smaller companies, where the person reading the application is often the person you would work with.

"Some experience" in a job ad is often a wish, not a requirement. Apply anyway.

Coursework counts more than you think if you describe it properly. "Built a multithreaded web crawler in Python for my networks module" is experience. "Did coursework" is not. Same work, very different sentence.

Small fixes to open source projects count too. A merged pull request that fixes a typo in the docs is still a public record that you can find your way around someone else's codebase and their process.

This is really encouraging, thank you. Rewriting my CV with real descriptions of the coursework tonight, and I am going to turn the tic-tac-toe game into something my flatmates can actually play.