I started studying programming last year, currently learning c# and c++ at college (even though I'm a 29 years old electrical engineer.. long story...) any advice on how to start looking for internships and jobs? I feel very lost on how to proceed to gain experience and feel that many of my colleagues have the same issue. Thanks

First: welcome!!
Second: what do you want to work with? There are many niches in the programming community.

Are there any particular areas of interest?

@AleCx04 thanks, I appreciate it.

I guess this is the biggest issue actually. I'm not sure what areas are out there. I feel that I'm a lot more into developing applications than working with web development (I understand I can develop web applications as well). The gaming industry is pretty big in the city o currently live and I would really love to work in this field, however, I'm afraid to be already too old to learn all the skills necessary ... kinda having a mid-mid life crisis here. Areas that I'm very interested, such as machine learning, look thousands of years away from me now as well. Am I being too pessimist?

@DiogoTM ml is much easier then you think it is. You can just jump right in with some machine vision based on opencv that has a lot of ml under the hood.
The most important thing here is to get a job somewhere, and then git gud.

@magicMirror
Thanks, I'll look into it! I thought I would need some mileage before looking into anything like this. I guess I can start right now, at least to familiarize with the subject.