First internship interview coming up; wanting to keep other options open (electrical engineering)

Isaac2
Tue, 23 Dec 2014 21:02:01 +0000

So I got my first internship interview coming up soon for an electrical engineering summer internship.

The internship is with Lockheed Martin and the position sounds like something I would enjoy doing. I’m guessing I will learn more about the position at the interview. At the risk of sounding like an ingrate, although I’m happy about the interview and the prospect of getting an offer I wouldn’t say it’s my dream position. There are other positions which I would prefer to get even though I would be very happy with this one.

My concern is that I would like to keep my options open for any future offers that I may get from other companies. They want to interview me at the end of January and I think the way things usually go is that if people perform well enough on these interviews then they usually get an offer soon after which they have to accept or decline within a short time frame. This is an onsite interview, and the site isn’t close to my college so they would be paying to fly me there so I assume that there won’t be any more interviews after this interview. Is it possible to get a fairly long time to accept/decline an offer if they offer me the position this early? I mean there’s still quite a bit of time until summer. My concern is that a better opportunity might come along later and that I will end up regretting accepting this position. Is it possible to decline a position after accepting it without burning bridges? Our school has a career fair in early February so I was hoping of getting a more favorable offer following that event.

Also on a separate note is it odd if the company has the first interview onsite? That seems very odd to me. I interviewed with them last year on campus so maybe they were using my previous year’s interview results to screen me. I also had a phone interview with them for a full time position (that was when I wasn’t sure whether or not I would be going to grad school or not). So perhaps they used my previous interviews from a long time ago for prescreening?

Also isn’t it odd that they would not offer relocation to the site? Is that something I can try negotiating?

For the record my main reasons for wanting to wait for something better are that as much as the position interests me I do not see myself working in the defense industry after school. A small part of that is for moral reasons and a big part of that is because I heard that the hours are long and I’m afraid that my dual citizenship would limit my opportunities within the company further down the line. I think I would also prefer to work on consumer goods. On the other hand the position seems to be in designing hardware which sounds awesome since a lot interns I don’t think do a lot of designing and it also focuses on an area I enjoy (RF) so I think I could gain some valuable experience that I could take with me even if I decide not to go into the defense industry further down the road. I think they would also provide me with secret clearance, which perhaps holds a certain market value (???), but then again I probably wouldn’t want to go into defense after school anyway so maybe it’s not worth mentioning.

Do companies making consumer goods like intel, Qualcomm, apple, etc. look down on defense internships at all?

Thank you for reading.