In the eye of Hurricane Interns.

Although I haven't really posted about this year's crop of interns since the draft, there has been quite a bit still going on behind the scenes with regards to the intern program to prepare for their arrival in July. The offers went out, and happily every single offer was accepted (might this be a first?)! Unfortunately, some time later one of our interns had to drop out due to an unexpected family emergency; so although alternates were told the selection process was complete and they were no longer under consideration, we dipped back into the pool to select a replacement.In the end we have 13 summer interns for 2013: seven girls, six boys, coming from eleven different schools, and two from outside New York State.

Recently I have been busy assembling their hiring paperwork (just like last year) and getting things arranged with HR for in-processing coming up on June 17. HR actually decided to use our interns as a pilot group for a new I-9 procedure that begins online, instead of being a written-out form. I tried logging in and it seemed pretty straightforward, so, we'll see how that goes!

You've got mail!

Meanwhile, we tried something new this year, which I don't think I have mentioned yet. Because of the huge number of applications this year, we actually opened up our applicant pool to the rest of the College of Science in case they might want to hire someone for the summer. Most of the leg work was already done, and organizationally over the summer we would integrate any other interns with our own - so if someone wanted some free labor for the summer with very little effort to have to put in to coordination, here are 75 well qualified candidates. Well, only two people took us up on our offer, and in the end only one of them came through. So over the past few weeks I have been working with them to select some candidates from our applicant pool, schedule and carry out interviews, and ultimately select an intern - it's like intern interviews all over again! It has been a fair amount of work to duplicate these efforts, especially when weighed against the unexpectedly low level of interest we got from COS, so I wonder whether we will attempt anything like this again next year. The other interesting angle to this is that this position is unpaid, so it will be a learning experience to see how this whole experiment works out.

Anyways, now we are approaching the time of year that I can finally catch my breath, in between the crazy springtime outreach/recruitment/intern-selection rush and the arrival of the interns. I'm looking forward to catching up on a number of things and getting to branch out into some other projects I haven't had time to pursue yet. Ahhh, Late May and June - I'm so happy to see you!