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Tesla is withdrawing summer internship offers as the automaker struggles with layoffs.
One student said she was disappointed to have lost her internship just weeks before it was scheduled to start.
Brook Gura said she turned down offers from other companies to work at Tesla.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by a real editor.
A college graduate who landed a prestigious Tesla internship must now make new career plans after the automaker rescinded her offer less than three weeks before she was scheduled to start.
Brook Gura, 21, had been looking forward to spending her summer as a human resources intern at Tesla, she told Business Insider this week. The University of Texas at Austin student said she interviewed with the company for about three weeks earlier this year before signing a contract with Tesla on Feb. 29. Business Insider has seen part of Gura’s offer letter from Tesla.
“It was exciting. I was looking for a big corporate internship,” Gura said. “And it was very close. I didn’t have to move.” Gura, who says she turned down internship offers from other companies in favor of Tesla, was particularly impressed by the pay – $26 an hour (the equivalent of about 24 euros), she said.
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The start of the twelve-week internship was planned for May 20th. Gura said she was told she would receive more information about picking up a company laptop in the first week of May.
When Tesla announced layoffs last month affecting 10 percent of its workforce, Gura wasn’t initially concerned. “Interns are relatively cheap compared to full-time employees,” she said. “I figured if they tried to reduce the number of employees, I might even work more.”
But while Gura was studying for final exams on Tuesday, she received a call from an unknown number. A few hours later, she received an email from a Tesla recruiter asking for a call back.
Gura said she immediately panicked and looked online to see if the company had made any additional layoffs. There she saw a Linkedin post from another intern who had lost his offer.
When she called the hiring manager back, Gura was pretty sure she knew what to expect. But the “pretty short” conversation still surprised her. “They simply explained that the company was going to make cuts that would impact interns, and that affected me,” Gura said. “There was no room for negotiation.”
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Gura said she initially panicked about how she would spend her last summer before graduating in December. “I was excited. This wasn’t the only internship offer I had. I chose Tesla from other organizations,” she said.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request from Business Insider for comment.
Gura published one of his own on Wednesday Post on Linkedin, in which she reached out to her professional network for support and opportunities. Other potential interns have too posted that they lost their Tesla internships. Gura said several interns have made connections following the cuts and are offering support to each other. Compared to other interns who had already paid for flights and accommodation, she said she was lucky.
Gura said she is trying to stay positive and look to the future. “When I take the time to think about it, I’ve learned that rejection is a detour,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “While I’m incredibly disappointed that I won’t have the summer I imagined, I know this moment will only help me grow stronger as a professional.”
But she can’t help but be disappointed by the whole experience. “What disappointed me the most is that I didn’t even get the chance to show my skills,” Gura said.
Read the original article in English here.