Interns

It's summertime and that means one thing: it's intern season at FederalEntity! From June-August all of the empty cubicles in my office are stuffed with wide-eyed interns. It breathes energy into the cubicle wasteland that is my office - energy that instantly disappears when school starts back up again.

I'm not sure where we find our interns - I don't think we advertise for them on the internet or anything. But based on the kids we've had working here, I'd safely guess that we recruit through two ways: nepotism and community college.

Half of the interns we've ever had have "known someone". Their dad is connected to one of our policitos... Their aunt works in another office at FederalEntity and is owed a favor by my boss... Their family has donated thousands of dollars to the Republican party... I actually don't mind this class of intern - they tend to perform well, mainly because they have a "connection" they feel they have to make good on. The other half, I'm not really sure where they come from but we've had some weird ones. There was the guy who didn't talk to anyone and ate Cup-O-Noodles for breakfast every morning at 7:30 am. There was the Native American guy who could never help us out with anything because he was always working on special "Native American" related projects (which were not assigned by his bosses...). There was the Frat Boy who spent the whole summer talking about getting wasted, hitting on chicks, and "scheming" (note to self: I never did figure out what he meant by "scheming").

We've got six new interns this year. Unfortunately, I haven't met them all yet, but I'm sure I'll have at least one good story by the end of the summer just you wait.

What do our interns do all summer? I'm not exactly sure. All I know is I'm not allowed to make them do anything. They inevitably get stuck doing a handful of grunt work. Lots of surfing the internet, facebook, gmail, youtube, etc. The work we do in my office is far too technical to teach a summer intern, so they help out with loose odds and ends on projects, and take long lunch breaks. They get paid pretty well for their troubles - $13 an hour I believe, plus overtime and every other Friday off. All in all, not a bad gig.

Half of our interns this summer are part of a student-professional internship program. If they rack up 640 hours of Federal service before they graduate from college, we can hire them directly and immediately when they graduate. They don't have to wait in line like the rest of the world to get a Federal job. The required number of hours translates to 71 nine hour work days. These poor kids (soon to be college Seniors) will be working the whole summer with no days off, plus winter break, plus spring break to accumulate the required hours - in the hope that we hire them full time next May. There's no guarantee that we will hire them (and looking at staffing levels, we can't hire them all even if we wanted to...) so they're ruining their summer for the mere chance at becoming a Fed. Is it worth it? I don't think so, but one of the interns told me that his dream is to have a career at my FederalEntity. Reminds me of myself when I was in college!