Anak Agung Gede Basawantara | 016201600085 | IR Defense 1 Batch 2016 | The Rise and

Fall of Multinational Corporations | Mr. Bayu Dwi Wicaksono, MPP. | Assignment 1 (Movie
Review)

“THE INTERNSHIP (2013)”

How does Google Treat its Interns?

The Internship (2013) is a Hollywood-produced comedy movie in 2013. The movie mainly
tells about the journey of two old-school salesmen, Billy McMahon (Vince Vaughn) and Nick
Campbell (Owen Wilson) whom lost their jobs due to the technological advancement of the
twenty-first century. In turn, the two applied for a summer internship program at Google US;
where both got accepted and must face out-of-the-box assignments and challenges of Google’s
internship program. In accordance with the movie, this essay would like to emphasize on how
Google treats its interns during Google’s internship program.

Google’s internship program is only available for university students and starts the same
as any other job recruitments: an interview session through online video call. The difference would
be on the questions that Google’s officials would give, which consisted of four vital questions that
applicants must answer. One of the questions includes “Imagine yourself is shrunk as tiny as a
nickel; both of you are drowned at the bottom of a blender. What would you do?”. The questions
require out-of-the-box answers and thus, the answers will assessed and highly considered by
Google’s Internship Program Board of Manager, where the Board will choose the applicants whom
succeeded the interview session.

On the first day of internship, the interns are gathered at Google’s office for re-registration.
Subsequently, the interns will be divided into teams of 5 to 6 people and each team will get a
supervisor from Google’s Board of Manager. Each team must then compete and succeed in every
asssignments and challenges that Google will give. Google will give scores and assessment on
each team; where there will only be one winning team by the end of the internship program and
the winning team will be guaranteed full-time jobs at Google. Additionally, the Head of Google’s
Internship Program emphasizes that the team with the most “Googliness” – a term that Google
defines as an “intangible thing that made a search engine into an engine for change” – will succeed
the internship program.

Google also provides its interns with seminar sessions with the objective of increasing the
interns’ knowledge of Google and IT. The seminars include seminars on Google’s Introduction

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and Culture, Work place seminar – on Google’s Rules and Regulations, Coding seminar, HTML5
seminar, and even Google Translate seminar. Nevertheless, each seminar only have limited seats,
which means only the fastest interns will be able to attend the seminars. The seminars will be
helpful for interns on completing their assignments and challenges of the internship program.

The first challenge that each team must complete is a de-bugging challenge, where each
team must de-bug an audio and the fastest and most correct team wins. The second challenge is a
physical challenge: a Quidditch match challenge. Each team must face one another in a Quidditch
match, where the team with the most excellent teamwork and scores the most wins. The third
challenge is a create-an-app challenge, where each team must create a new app that is helpful for
the downloaders; the team with the most downloaded app wins. The fourth challenge is a
calculations challenge, where each team will be given a math calculation and they must solve the
calculation within a period of time; the fastest and the most correct team wins. As for the fifth
challenge, each team is required to be a Google Tech Support. The teams are given one day to
learn about Google’s application – such as Google Mail, Map, Play, Drive, Wallet – and their
frequently and most asked questions on the apps. The teams will then be assigned to manage
Google’s Helpline, where they must log-in into their accounts to run a helpline on the apps and
must submit their call logs to the Board for further review; the team with the most call logs wins.

Last, but not least, the final challenge of Google requires the teams to find a company that
has not advertise on Google yet and to convince the company to advertise on Google. In this
challenge, the teams’ score will be assessed based on the successful rate of the business; whether
the team manage to make the business blossom or not. The teams must send their final report to
the Board on the evening of the final challenge day. Afterwards, the Board will announce the
winning team based on the accumulation of scores and assessment from day one of internship until
the final day; and the winning team members are guaranteed full-time jobs at Google.

Google’s internship program has shown to have unique challenges and assignments that
the interns must complete during the whole internship program. Based on the way Google treat
its interns, the challenges are meant to implant the values of team work, dedication, and hard work
on each intern. Out-of-the-box thinking and perception are also vital to complete the challenges,
not only for the interns but also the employees. Moreover, having and upholding the sense of
“Googliness” and creating and maintaining good networking are also as vital as the other values.