Chocolate Boxes and Internships

Though I'm not a huge Tom Hanks fan, I'm not shy about pulling an analogy from Forrest Gump in how life is full of surprises. In the movie titled after the main character, Forrest relates to a stranger how his mother always compared life to a box of chocolates, asserting that you never know what you're going to get when you bite into a random sample. Obviously, they didn't buy Whitman's, but that's another story.

I've found the same to be true in my own life and, in particular, through the travail of finding that ideal summer internship. I'll share my story in hopes to inspire future first-years that things really do work out, and quite often not as you expected.

I knew I had a different path from the start. Being in tech marketing, my search was very different from other marketers looking for roles in CPG or Retail. Tech starts their recruiting season much later and causes much higher stress levels to the spouses of students looking for tech internships. Fairly early in the game, I interviewed with Adobe in Orem. The series of interviews went well and I received an internship offer around the turn of the year. I was convinced that it would be a great opportunity (and still think it would have been in many ways) and was on the verge of accepting it... until we took our Tech Trek to the Bay Area. The experience there was eye-opening, and I decided that the best thing for my career path would be to get out of Utah. I was particularly interested in getting to Silicon Valley and started looking at options there.

I couldn't keep Adobe on hold any longer, and took a big leap of faith when I declined their offer. Through feeling out different companies, I decided to focus on two that I felt were a best-fit for my personality and goals: Amazon and eBay. I could go on for a while explaining the "why" behind those, two, but I'll forebear.

While still waiting for internship requisitions to open up at eBay, some good news came from Amazon in late February. I was contacted to go through a first round of phone interviews. That was when things got a little interesting.

First off, the recruiter sent a confirmation email referencing a cell phone number that I had not used for 3 years. I wrote him to correct it and asked how they got it. It turns out, I had an old Amazon profile. I updated the phone number with the recruiter and on my outdated Amazon careers profile and forgot about the incident. That is, I forgot about it until the phone interview came. As is common, one of the interviewer's first questions for me was to walk me through the resume. Having rehearsed this a good number of times with my Sherpa, Rick, I confidently started with "Well, I graduated with a degree in Spanish..." and ended with "... and that's when I knew it was time to come back for the MBA. And I've loved it here."

I was surprised to hear his reply, "Wait... so, you're going back to get an MBA?"

"No," I answered, "I'm about to finish my first year of school. I'm looking for a summer internship."

"The SFA (Senior Financial Analyst) role?"

"Actually, marketing / retail management."

"Hmm. Well, let's go on with the interview anyway."

The interview actually went really well and the follow-up (Amazon does back-to-back phone interviews) interview was very similar. "Tell me about yourself." "I'm Lewis...Spanish...Online Marketing...MBA..." "Oh, you're marketing?" "Yeah." "Well, let's interview anyway."

I contacted the recruiter to clarify things and they promptly rectified it and set me up with some marketing interviews. I kind of knew pretty quickly that they weren't going quite as well. One of them was just nightmarish (I got put on mute several times, making it impossible to get a read on the interviewer).

About a week later I heard back from Amazon's HR department. They told me that, not surprisingly, marketing wasn't very impressed but that the SFA guys were interested - pending my interest in finance. "Finance?" I thought to myself. "Why not?" I agreed to a follow up interview, which also went surprisingly well. Then, just a short 2 days later, they extended an offer.

The moral of the story? Sometimes the path is twisted and completely not what you would have assumed it would be. But hang in there because things work out. Life really is like a box of chocolates, just hopefully with a lower concentration of saturated fats.

Lewis Gunter, Class of 2012, Marketing