Speed Dating…For an Internship?

Times have become so terrible that the unemployed in España need to speed date in order to land an internship. Or so that’s what it felt like.  Approximately thirty business students were vying for some twenty positions offered by our study abroad program.

Sounds intense. Well, it WAS intense. Kelleys (business students at Indiana University) are used to bidding for interviews, getting selected as one of ten (or however many the company chooses), arriving at our Undergraduate Career Services Office (UCSO) fifteen minutes ahead of schedule and having a one-on-one interview with a recruiter. Unfortunately, all that interviewing at Kelley never prepared us for what we experienced today: a small hotel banquet room, twenty some tables, two hours and awkward five to ten minute interviews in the open…in SPANISH.

You read correctly. For roughly 100 minutes, I babbled on and on about Indiana University, my internship with Wrigley, my aspirations for the future, my hobbies and why I chose Sevilla of all places to study.  At first, I had a major case of word vomit – spewing “umm” and “so” between Spanish words – but after the first two interviews, I felt my Spanish improving exponentially.  By the tenth interview (yes, ten), I had my script down and was incorporating new business terms I had learned along the way. Clever, I know.

Though it may seem like the worst is over, interviews were only the calm before the storm.  Tonight begins the first of many sleepless nights most of us will be enduring.  While we cross our fingers and twiddle our thumbs, our study abroad program director will be pairing each candidate to an empresa (business).

Seems simple, right? If it were simple, I’d have nothing to blog about. The process goes somewhat like this: after the two hours, each company is asked to rank the students they spoke with.  The students are also asked to do the same. The director takes both lists and matches all the empresas with their number one choices and then goes down from there (like our intense Greek system, for all you Hoosiers reading). Now, this can end in one of four ways:

1.       A student ends up with his/her top choice

2.       A student settles for his/her second (or third) choice

3.       An empresa decides it doesn’t want any interns, if it doesn’t receive its first choice

4.       A student ends up with no internship

With more students than businesses, number four is a likely option.  In this case, students will have to interview with other companies, on their own time…an added stress none of us want with major classes starting in a few days.

Nonetheless, you’re looking at some accomplished Kelleys who, I have no doubt, will secure internships within the first round.  With any luck, this picture will make it into our business school’s marketing tools. ;)