#i have an internship secured for winter break that pays TWICE what i make now and if it goes well it'll continue after i graduate

[red-eft]

i'm quitting my job 👏👏👏

[2heavyaload]

AHHHHHHHHH. I AM AN INCOMING TAX INTERN AT A TOP 100 PUBLIC ACCOUNTING FIRM IN THE US AND ONE OF THE FASTEST GROWING COMPANIES. OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG.

All week I had been refreshing, refreshing again, and refreshing again until Friday 6/26 at 12:40 pm I got the call from the recruiter in Minnesota. As the days went by I started to get more and more insecure and anxious about my interview. I knew I had it in the BAG baby cause the worst things they could’ve done was divide us into markets by what office we were applying to. It showed me the competition and it was waaayyy slimmer than what I thought. Through the Xperience I noticed there were some uni business students and I just started counting everybody thinking they were gunning for the position too and I stopped myself and said “just focus on you”. It was me and two other guys with one that was bold af and said the reason why he was interested was because he had had a number of internships before and the other was was a lil sophomore who don’t know what the hell going on in the profession. He will eventually but in the present tense, he don’t know his ass from his foot and we were all like that, don’t get me wrong. I told my mom I said if they don’t hire me they are crazy, they are out of their minds, and they are SENILE. I’m just in disbelief. It’s my first internship that I got in the fucking FINAL semester of college when I’ve been trying to get an internship since I got in this bitch. It’s sunk in about half and then the other half it hasn’t because I already knew I had it so it wasn’t anything new or something I didn’t know, the internship doesn’t start until next spring, and it’s freaky because I actually got a PAID PAID PAID internship. I don’t have to do these damn odd part time and campus jobs anymore! I can quit my job this November going into the winter break. omg. omg. I thought I was going to have to work there until I fucking graduated. I’m getting TIRED of that job and it was starting to mess with me. The end is nigh

I tried not to cry and scream when I ended the call like I couldn’t even talk. I’m just so happy and I should’ve written this Friday but I’ve been trying to digest my offer acceptance letter. IM FRAMING THAT DAMN THING.

So now the plan is to use the summer and fall money to buy a car after finals in November because (I had no clue about this) some firms require employees to have 100/300/100 insurance as a condition of employment EVEN IF THEY’RE NOT TRAVELING. Its more than likely a tactic to make sure that people have transportation to get to work cause my ass was sure about to take a 30 minute bus ride for 75 cents for college students and call it a day. But nooo, so now I gotta get a car but it’s not like I’m crying about it cause I CAN AFFORD TO GET A CAR, PAY ALL MY BILLS, AND PUT MONEY AWAY WITH WHAT THEYRE PAYING ME!!!!!! IT’S LITTY. Then when the the internship is over and they offer me a staff/associate position (I already claimed it) I’ll stay here (bummer) until I take the certification exam in July while getting PAAAAAAAIIIDD and put money away to move. Transferring my exam scores to Minnesota, moving to Minnesota, and living the life. It’s a bummer that I’ll be staying here but I wouldn’t change my majors because I have one that I wanted to be in the industry since I was 15 (in my stilettos, im struttin in this game) that averages 75k with no experience straight out of college and another one that averages 85k straight out of college. Like the bag and my life is secured, TWICE, and if all it takes is a few extra months in a state that I’ve been trying to get out of for 13 years then so be it. Because its coming. 

-4:27pm

[deniscollins]

‘We Didn’t Get Ph.D.s Just to Sit Around’: Civil Servants’ Good Will Erodes

The government shutdown is now more than 35 days. If you were a highly-skilled researcher for NASA, which has a noble mission, but currently not being paid due to the shutdown, would you quit and accept a job for twice the salary with a private company: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

When things overheat, corrode and stop working, that is when they call in Gustavo Costa.

It’s a rare expertise, critical to everything from space travel to fracking, and it keeps him in steady demand as a contractor at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center. It has also put Dr. Costa, a United States citizen since August, within reach of his ultimate dream: working directly for NASA, a government agency as well-known as Coca-Cola back in his little Brazilian hometown.

These days, though, Dr. Costa does not make the five-mile trip from his house to the center. He is at home, already forced to consider jobs elsewhere because NASA has all but shut down for reasons that don’t seem to make much sense. Politics — even overheated, corroded, dysfunctional politics — are outside of Dr. Costa’s expertise.

“What are they going to do next?” he asked on a cold morning in his quiet living room. “Do they realize what damage they’re causing?”

The Civil Service relies to a large degree on good will. No matter how vital high-skilled federal workers are to the functioning of government, there are usually companies willing to offer them much higher salaries — double or even triple in some cases — on top of the free lunches and stock options. As student debt soars and private sector opportunities multiply, the sheer allure of public service — “the mission,” as NASA researchers often put it — is what keeps a lot of talent in the government.

The longest shutdown in the country’s history is eroding that good will, already wearing thin after years of pay freezes, unpredictable budgets, and disdain from even the White House for government workers as swamp creatures or worse.

Long after the government reopens, this is the damage that could last. If public service loses its allure, it will make it harder to recruit and hold onto the experienced and talented, those who can design spacecraft but also the people who battle epidemics, predict hurricanes and keep the food supply safe.

Steve Reaves, a Federal Emergency Management Agency employee who leads the union for FEMA workers, said he knew firsthand of six experienced people who had left the agency since the shutdown began. Two went to BP, the oil giant.

“They’re relying on the pure good intentions of the higher skilled work force,” said Matt Linton, a computer security specialist in California who worked for NASA’s Ames Research Center for 14 years. “And that’s what they drain down the most quickly in these stupid shutdowns.”

This is a concern across federal agencies and departments — and even, strikingly, at NASA, the gold standard of government agencies, which seemed in the past to have no trouble attracting anyone with the right stuff.

The essential pitch is spelled out in large metal letters at the entrance to the Glenn Research Center, a half-moon-shaped cluster of buildings just northwest of the Cleveland airport. “Research and technology,” it reads, “for the benefit of all.”

In normal times, around 3,000 people are at work at Glenn, roughly half of them contractors and the other half civil servants, designing subsonic aeronautics or recreating the atmosphere of Venus. For the past few weeks it has been nearly empty.

The workers at Glenn are mostly waiting, drawing down savings, wondering about the state of their untended lab work, reading about Chinese spacecraft landing on the moon and pondering the appeal of the public good when a good chunk of the public seems to have little use for it.

“All these people seem to be celebrating our misfortune,” said Michael Kulis, a NASA chemist, who had seen comments on social media portraying federal workers as layabouts enjoying their vacations.

Or, as one administration official said in an op-ed shared on Twitter by the president, the workers offered “nothing of external value” and were doing “errands for the sake of errands.”

A Navy veteran who is the son of a police officer, Dr. Kulis is committed to staying at NASA, but finds all the scorn for public servants disheartening. “We didn’t get Ph.D.s just to sit around,” he said.

As a place to work, NASA still measures up against the corporate world, where venture capital comes and goes, big contracts are lost, funders get impatient. Even SpaceX, Elon Musk’s private space travel company, recently announced it was laying off around 10 percent of its work force. There are pensions and benefits in government work, and there is job stability. Or at least there used to be.

Recruiters and others at NASA say that even before the shutdown, the agency has not been the draw on top talent it once was. A graduate student interested in aerospace engineering is as likely to be wearing a SpaceX logo as the old blue-and-red NASA meatball.

Interns come to Glenn, learn what they can and leave for Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney or Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company.

The shutdown is not making recruiting any easier. The already slim stipends for postdoctoral fellows, invited to spend their early careers at NASA, have run dry, leaving them at the mercy of online fund-raising. Jeffrey Severino, a college student from the Bronx who planned to spend his winter break developing algorithms on a paid internship at Glenn, spent it instead delivering takeout.

“I still want to work for them,” he said of NASA, though he is now asking what he would do if a shutdown were to happen again.

Now, even scientists and engineers several years into their careers at NASA are talking of leaving before things get worse.

“People have forgotten what public institutions do and the roles that they play,” said one young NASA research scientist, who dreamed of working at NASA as a child in a family of immigrants, and discovered a new planet before he got out of high school.

The scientist, who did not want to give his name out of fear of political reprisal, spent much of the past year preparing for an ambitious climate-related project to start in early January, based on his own technology and involving aircraft, boats and an international team of scientists. The shutdown canceled it. He is now working as a Lyft driver to pay the bills, an arrangement that can keep him afloat for only a few more days.

“I don’t want to give up on my country, but if you’re good at science and that’s what you do that’s what’s going to happen,” he said by phone on the way to a job interview. “There are opportunities in Canada that have a lot of great scientific potential.”

Governments are among the few places with the money and the latitude for research into fundamental questions without immediate or obvious application.

This is the kind of research rarely found on Wall Street or even Silicon Valley, where science is typically tied to the bottom line.

“We can’t land humans on Mars, reverse climate change or cure cancer without it,” said Lee Stone, a NASA research scientist and a vice president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, a union that represents thousands in the government and private sector.

When asked in an email about the shutdown’s effect on NASA, an agency spokeswoman, Katherine Brown, had an automatic reply that she was in furlough status and unable to respond.

Mr. Linton, the California computer security specialist, had considered himself “a lifer” at NASA. “I felt like my job meant something,” he said.

But in the fall of 2013, Congress could not agree about a budget amid a Republican crusade to defund the Affordable Care Act. So, to his astonishment, the government shut down for two weeks.

He was the only one in his section deemed essential, which meant coming to the center for four hours a day. The rest of the time he was free to think: about the needs of his young family and about the message sent by a government that deems thousands of its employees not valuable enough to do their jobs.

A Silicon Valley firm emailed him, asking him to visit in his spare time. He went, learned he could be making double his salary and shortly after the shutdown ended, left government for good.

“Before 2013,” Mr. Linton said, “you at least felt like the whole country was behind you when you said, ‘I work for NASA.’ Now it’s absolutely evident that only 40 or 50 percent of the country is behind you and the other 40 or 50 percent think you’re some sort of fiscal drain.”

The current shutdown, he said, was proof that he was right to leave when he did.

His old colleagues at NASA now see that, too. He has been getting emails from them over the past few weeks, he said. They are asking for references.