So many interviews!

Interview has been the word for this week.

Backstory: what guides your thesis and is the capstone experience of LGO is a six month long internship with a partner company.  This is done during the summer between your first and second years in the program and is a chance to put to use your work experience and lots of what you've learned at MIT.  Sometimes internships lead to full-time offers with companies, but the immediate goal is to make positive change for the company you work for.

Both students and companies have input into this process and matching proceeds much like how medical residents get matched, students rank companies and companies rank students.  The best compromise where everyone gets matched is the goal.  Last year the 12s had many first and second choices, but the fact remains that you could be assigned to any project you rank.

Over the holiday break, internship descriptions began to appear.  During plant trek we had to submit a list of projects we wanted to interview for and finally, after three days this week of meeting with partner companies for 20 minutes at a time for each interview, I managed to complete my 19 interview sessions to learn about 23 on-cycle projects.  Phew!  I thought that the interviews were going to be the hard part, but turns out that ranking, at least in my case, seems to be much more brain wracking.

Besides the inerviews that the '13s went through this past week, on Friday and again on Monday and Tuesday, LGO will be interviewing candidates for the class of 2014.  We've begun InterviewFest and I've had fun speaking with prospectives, sitting in on a panel discussion about the program and then going out to dinner off campus.  Tonight we'll be holding an event of food and fun at an on-campus pub, The Thirsty Ear, which is located in the new Ashdown graduate dormitory.  Should be a good time.