We've been interviewing students for the fall internship the past couple of weeks. We have 5 positions opened and we had only found 4 candidates so we were still interviewing yesterday.
One of the 2 students we interviewed was friends with a student we had 2 years ago that we kept on part time because he was such a sweetheart, did the work well and he wanted to stick around. The student said all the right things, seemed eager and interested and the descriptions of the job we gave him seemed to enthrall him. So we made him an offer, which he accepted. He'd obviously also heard good things from the student who worked with us.
The other student had never read the job description. It was obvious that he was at a point where he can't take any more classes until he does his first internship and he had applied to every single job he could apply to. He showed up at the interview not only not knowing what he was applying for, but smelling of desperation. It's never a good thing to smell of desperation. That's definitely not a good way to sell oneself!
Of course as usual I got large piles of CV's and I had to sort first by GPA, I can't hire someone who's GPA is too low, company policy, then I remove anyone who isn't a first or 2nd year. After that I start looking at cover letters. Anyone who's cover letter is taking about a division different from the one I work for is also not going to get an interview. Either make a generic cover letter that applies to all the company or make a different cover letter for each position you're applying for and watch that if you're applying in Graphics, you don't ramble on about how much you like our Imaging division! Especially for a Quality Assurance job. You need to pay attention to detail, if you can't even put the right thing on your resume, how can I trust you'll find the problems?
The current interns I have are doing really well. We have one that carried over from last semester. He's a student from UQAM, who was happy to stay on an extra semester especially since his classes were cancelled. So at least he's worked, got more work experience, especially since he's an international student and in his case really improved his English. He decided to do another stage in another team and got the internship for fall. So no matter what happens with school, he's good till winter. Great kid.
The other who started in early May are working independently and managing their work well. One student felt she was thrown to the wolves so to speak but is absolutely loving the experience. She pointed out usually they get months of theory and then get asked to do something, here they got asked to do something and they are learning as they go along. But she also noted it she was really appreciating this experience because it's like nothing she's done before. Many students are first surprised by the responsibility I give them, but then by the end of the work term feel like they were truly part of the team and it gave them a really good idea of what working will be like. Especially for engineering students, if they will be responsible for designing things, they need to be able to work by themselves.
Before I went on vacation, I gave them a list of boards that needed to be covered with the drivers and told them to divide the work among themselves and to consult one another if they found issues. At first it was the two girls working on this, and the male student was assigned to another task, and then once it was finished he was to consult them to see what he needed to test. They made their own spreadsheet to keep track of their progress, and have found a plethora of issues. They are doing the main of the testing because the rest of the team is currently on Wind8ws since it's getting close to release.
Posts
