summer externship

Today we’re interviewing a student for a summer extern position. HGR was incredulous at the idea of me being part of an interview panel. “Is there anything they could say to make you not take them?” he said. It’s unlikely. Every extern interview I’ve been in on has gone like this: We do the interview. Afterwards, we all look at each other and say, “They seem nice.” And we offer them a position.

There’s only been one candidate who did not seem nice, and that was only in retrospect. This guy was hot stuff. He had previously worked for the House of Lords. We were like “He seems nice” and offered him an externship. He turned it down, saying he’d accepted a position elsewhere. Fine. Not surprising that Mr. House of Lords had better prospects than us. But it still rankled a bit, because during the interview he waxed eloquent about how it would be so exciting and such a great learning experience to work with us, and it felt like we got fed a load of BS.

Our current candidate is requesting a late summer externship because he’s already accepted a different job for early summer. That kind of go-go-go mindset is incomprehensible to me. Bro, you only have a couple summer vacations left. Enjoy them while they last. (But I’m not going to say this. It would be impolitic, and dropping unsolicited life advice is not my style anyway. Plus, he wouldn’t agree.)

I did like one on-campus interview in school and bombed out spectacularly. I wound up doing summer internships with L because it was the path of least resistance. There was a lot of downtime that I spent browsing the internet. That was the flatmonkeys era. I can’t believe that was a thing. More precisely, I can’t believe such petty drama was so important back then. But I don’t regret my involvement. The premise was that Jake was a supercilious, holier-than-thou twat, and he and his cronies were making things miserable for Kyle at school, and I wanted to show up for Kyle. Point is, the flatmonkeys drama was way more important to me than my summer internship. But I got to put the latter on my resume, so woop.

Anyway, the interview went well. He was nice. In fact he was so nice that Noah directly offered him the externship at the end of the interview. (None of this “wait until tomorrow to send the offer so it looks like we thought about it.” We’re so chill around here.) I couldn’t resist one comment of “Busy summer” to which he was like “yeahhhh…” :| but also :) because it was an interview and it’s like a rule you have to smile for the entire interview.