Interns have run of offices, receiving little supervision

Employees working remotely, make it hard to impress bosses

Alex Hyman pictured his summer internship as being one part Entourage and one part The O∞ce: people screaming into telephones Ari Gold superagent style, others menacing their desk mates as unnervingly as Dwight Schrute did at Dunder-Mi±in.

Instead, the office of his entertainment agency was mostly empty when Hyman, 20, arrived in early June, on the day he had been told to report to the Los Angeles location. He waited outside a locked door until a colleague found him and explained that his boss was working from home. Hyman was dropped off in a conference room with his fellow interns. They spent the day navigating Excel and joking about it. (What is an Excel joke? “How do you not know how to use Excel,” Hyman said, insisting it was funny at the time.)

“I think everyone is a little nervous for the first day on a job,” Hyman said with a laugh. “This definitely threw a curveball in what I was expecting.”

Summer interns generally are aware of what awkward rites of passage await them. Most have to attend their share of stilted happy hours and softball games. They might have to nod their way through a brown bag lunch. Now, though, interns experience a strange new introduction to professional life. Working a summer job can mean commuting to an empty office, sitting unsupervised with other interns and trying desperately to impress managers over video calls. School is out for the summer — but in some cases, so are the bosses.

“The thing I’ve always been taught by my parents is to be the first one in and last one out,” Hyman said. “But there’s no one else there. My boss isn’t going to see me put my best foot forward.”

Office occupancy across the country has remained under 50 percent on average, according to the building security firm Kastle. Executives have often said they worry the youngest generation of workers will have no interest in returning to — or in some cases, even entering — an office environment. But some research has found that young people are more eager to work in person than their senior counterparts.

A continuing survey of more than 5,000 Americans, started during the pandemic at Stanford, the University of Chicago and ITAM, found that the share of people ages 20-29 who want to work remotely full time is just 24 percent, while it is 41 percent among workers 50-64. Many recent college graduates are hungry for friendship. Others are fatigued from spending the past few years locked down in their dorms. “They’re people-starved,” said Cyrus Beschloss, 25, founder of the Generation Lab, a firm that polls his own generation. “The last thing folks want is to do something that’s meant to be in person on a Zoom. Even if there’s a light dusting of people coming into the office every day, as much as young people can recreate some semblance of normal — dare I say 9 to 5 — that’s comforting.”

Research suggests junior employees have gone back to the office in greater numbers than their managers. A study in April from Future Forum, a research consortium backed by the office messaging company Slack, found 35 percent of nonexecutives surveyed were back in the office five days a week compared with 19 percent of executives. The impulse to go into the office can be especially strong for those who have just a few summer weeks to get to know their employers. About 300,000 Americans work internships each year, with about 60 percent in paid positions and 40 percent in unpaid roles that they hope will lead to permanent opportunities, according to the job search site Zippia. More than half tend to take full-time offers from the places where they intern, which can heighten the desire to form relationships.

For plenty of college students, in-person work has come as a reprieve after two years of relative isolation. Freshman orientations went remote, college seminars moved online, prom and senior skip day were canceled. No wonder sitting in a conference room with other people might sound appealing.

Hamna Tariq, for example, graduated in Trinity College’s class of 2020, so she rarely met her colleagues while working her first job at a think tank. She spoke with them during virtual happy hours and Netflix viewing sessions, when they all watched the same movies simultaneously. She entered the office only once — on her final day.

Now Tariq, 25, who just finished the first year of a master’s program at Columbia, is getting a sense of office life by working an in-person internship at the Atlantic Council in Washington, another think tank. Some of the norms that may have once seemed routine now feel refreshing: greeting the CEO when he strolls by on his way to the elevator, planning outings to the popular “Jazz in the Garden” series with other interns.

“We banter about everything and anything under the sun,” Tariq said. “If I have a crazy idea for writing a paper, I can go to a co-worker’s office and knock on his door.”

The desire for normalcy is even driving career planning for some students. Amanda Schenkman, 21, said she had applied only to in-person and hybrid internships this summer. She got to experience the thrill of plotting her first-day outfit with the other interns through text messages, trading TikToks about corporate attire. It felt like preparing for the first day of school.