Internship Palava: Landing in America IV

The first time R took me to the store 
to shop for groceries and other 
household items, I was overwhelmed 
by all the options available for every 
single item. 
There were about 10 options for eggs!! 
There were several options for chicken, 
milk, fruits, and vegetables. 
I find it difficult to make decisions when 
faced with too many options and my 
response to R whenever she asked me 
for the option of any item I wanted 
was always “the cheapest one”. 
R would go on to tease me mercilessly 
whenever we went shopping by asking 
me for the option I wanted. 
I couldn’t afford a vacuum cleaner and 
had to settle for one of those long, 
plastic broom to sweep my apartment. 
However, I wasn’t too fond of it and 
I had my mum send me one of those 
brown Nigerian brooms all the way 
from Lagos. Since I didn’t have a job, 
I spent most of my free-time 
binge-watching all the TV series I 
started back in Nigeria.
The professor who taught the wireless 
course whose pre-requisite I failed 
was exactly like some of my Unilag 
elect/elect teachers. 
He dictated notes in class and was 
always too fast. 
Often times, I had to find other people’s 
notes to fill in the missing gaps in my 
notes. 
He barely explained what he taught and 
whenever he did explain, I never 
understood his explanation TBH. 
Luckily for me, my Ghanaian friend, J, 
loaned me the textbook she used for 
the course and told me I just needed 
to understand the weekly assignments 
he gave and I would do well. 
I had come too far just to cram and 
pass and I decided I needed to 
understand the course at all costs. 
Often times, this involved me turning 
off my phone and wifi to avoid distractions 
and spending hours just study and 
understand a few pages of the textbook 
and my notes and solving all my 
assignments myself. 
My efforts eventually paid off as I 
was able to tutor 3 of my classmates 
in the course and score an A, 
while some of my classmates performed 
poorly, and others were caught cheating.
The professor of the Business course 
assigned us weekly assignments 
involving an advanced use of excel 
which I loved. 
However, I under-estimated the mid-term 
exam and scored 73/200 while the 
class average was 79. 
You already know I cried and vowed 
to make up for it in the final exams. 
I took all my home works very seriously 
going forward and would email my 
professor or go to see him for any 
clarifications I needed. I ended up 
scoring 84/100 – second only to the 
highest score which was 86/100 - in 
the final exams which earned me an 
A- to my professor’s greatest surprise. 
He told me he had never seen anyone 
turn-around their grades like I did 
and you already know this compliment 
made my head swell. 
I enjoyed the lectures in my 2nd wireless 
class and did well in the mid-term exam 
where I scored 93/100. 
I must have under-estimated the final 
exams as I devoted more time to my 
other 2 courses and ended up getting 
an A- instead of the easy A I could 
have gotten. I remember walking off 
in anger after checking my grade in 
the professor’s office and seeing my 
GPA was 3.8/4 and not the 4.0 
I planned to get.
In my first semester, I wanted to attend 
a Nigerian church since I wanted a mode 
of worship that was most familiar to me. 
I looked up the closest Nigerian church 
online, called the number listed and 
spoke with the pastor of the church 
explaining that I was a new graduate 
student from Nigeria. 
He offered to pick me up for service on 
Sunday and all through the ride to church, 
he kept telling me about how a lot of his 
members had to work on Sundays and 
that explained why his church looked
 like it had only a few members but if 
I kept coming, I would meet the other 
members. 
People of God, please ask me how many 
of us were in church that day? 
4-people including me! The other 3 were
the pastor, his wife, and another guy. 
I attended service for 2 more weeks and 
we never exceeded 5 members including 
the pastor and his wife. 
After the 3rd week, I began giving excuses 
for not being able to attend church 
whenever the pastor called me and he 
eventually stopped calling. 
Months later when I started another 
church and was narrating my experience 
to an African girl I met there, she 
laughed hard and told me she had also 
attended the church a few years ago 
and the pastor had told her the 
same story yet they were never more 
than 5 on any given Sunday.
I joined a fellowship on campus called 
CoC and eventually started attending 
the church affiliated with it. 
The experience was different from what 
I was used to but I stayed there the 
entire first semester mostly because 
the older couple who picked up 
myself and other students always 
served us a full-English breakfast 
every Sunday before church, and food 
was very important to a broke student 
like me. 
The fellowship also gave dinner to 
students every Friday night and that’s 
when I found out Caucasians eat rice 
without stew, and the white people's 
salad consisted of vegetables like 
tomatoes and spinach strewn together 
and eaten with ranch dressing which 
I hated. 
Anyway, the church was named the 
way the churches in the new testament 
were named. 
The same way you had the church of 
Corinth or the church in Ephesus was the 
same way the church was named after 
the city where it was located. 
They had no pastor as they didn’t believe 
in one person leading the rest of the 
church – everyone had equal responsibilities 
while they had a person who merely 
oversaw their activities.
The only instrument played at the church 
was an organ and there was no church 
program. 
Anyone could raise a song from the hymnbook 
and at the end of each song in a sing-song 
voice, people would randomly exclaim 
phrases like “Lord Jesus”, “Lord Jesus we 
love you” or some of the phrases from 
the hymn that was just sung. 
They had a book kinda like a devotional 
which they read during the week and 
after the hymns, anyone could get up 
and share what they had learned 
during the week. 
I never read the book and I never got 
up to share. 
For communion, a couple of guys would 
literally all break the unleavened bread 
together inside a bowl using their hands 
before passing it around. 
I found it all weird but the correct breakfast 
I was eating every Sunday morning made 
me keep going all semester. 
I would wake up at 2 am every Sunday 
Morning to watch my local church service
in Nigeria though.
I attended a career fair in my first 
semester but nothing came out of it. 
Internships were a big deal as they formed 
a necessary part of your education and 
served as the American work experience 
you needed to secure a full-time job.
 I was initially fixated on an internship 
from a Telco but at the beginning of 
the second semester when I was yet 
to get an internship, I became open to 
any job. 
A lot of good companies recruited from 
my school and I was able to secure 
interviews with 2 of them – a QA role 
at Microstrategy, a software company 
and a Technology summer analyst role 
at Goldman Sachs, I wrote a bad-ass 
cover letter that I’m still Proud of till 
date for the Goldman Sachs role. 
The interview for the QA role was a 
very weird exam which I failed. 
But for the Goldman Sachs interview, 
I surprised myself. 
I was among the few people in my class 
that got called for the on-campus 
interview. 
Our professor already told us “everyone 
likes a happy puppy” meaning we should 
be excited and enthusiastic at our 
interviews. 
Me: say no more. I switched to my 
extroverted personality and turned on 
my charm full-blast and got my 
interviewers laughing in no time. I
 wasn’t surprised when I got the email 
asking me to come to NY for the final 
interview.
I didn’t own a suit and didn’t have $200 
to buy a new suit just for an interview 
(I wore a blazer and a skirt for the 
on-campus interview) and a friend was 
gracious enough to send me her suit all 
the way from California while I paid 
for shipping. 
The email asked me to choose my 
preferred mode of transport to NY 
- either by air, train or bus - and being 
a learner and wanting to show that 
I was not a wasteful. future employee, 
I foolishly chose the train. 
R dropped me off at the train station 
and I boarded the train to NY. 
I badly wanted to get the job because 
Goldman Sachs paid interns well – almost 
as much as full-time hires -  and I 
wanted to live in NY during the summer. 
I arrived at the hotel that was booked 
for me and it was massive and beautiful. 
I was shown my room and it was a 
one-bedroom suite with the words 
“Welcome, Oluwatoyin Alawode” displayed 
on the TV screen. 
I was told that I could order dinner from 
anywhere and get reimbursed for it but 
I was way too nervous to eat.
I arrived at the venue for the interview 
the following morning and saw several 
candidates from different schools – 
I was the only one from my class. 
We were given an introduction by one 
of the staff and told to mingle with 
other staff on ground and ask whatever 
questions we might have. 
My networking game was zero at the 
time and I just went to the breakfast 
table and stuffed myself with as much 
food as my stomach could take. 
My interview venue was in Jersey City 
and I and others were taken to the 
venue via a very nice ferry which we 
were told was only commissioned 
the previous day and we were its second 
occupants. 
There were 3 stages of interviews and it 
would have made a much nicer story if 
I said I killed all three interviews but 
alas that wasn’t to be. At these interviews, 
I wasn’t asked personality questions that 
I could bamboozle my way through – 
I was asked specific technical questions 
that you either knew or not and I mostly 
did not know. 
At the end of the interviews, an Indian 
girl from Columbia university walked up 
to me and we got talking all the way to 
the train station. 
She asked me how the interview was and
 I said it wasn’t great. 
She said it wasn’t great for her either and 
that made me hopeful that at least I could 
be the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. 
How my classmates got to know I was 
interviewed by Goldman Sachs is beyond 
me but one of my Indian classmates kept 
pestering me to find out if I had heard 
back from Goldman Sachs and never 
failed to inform me about her friend in 
a different department who was offered 
the role. 
Weeks later, when I hadn’t heard back 
from the recruiter I emailed her and she 
responded saying they’d get back to me 
with either an acceptance or a rejection. 
No rejection meant hope abi. 
That’s how I turned to prayer warrior and 
kept begging baba firecracker to have 
mercy and let me get the job seeing as 
I needed the experience and the money 
and vowing to do him proud if I got the job. 
Fast-forward to mid-April and I got a 
phone call from Goldman Sachs informing 
me they would no longer be proceeding 
with my application process. 
If I told you it didn’t pain me, I would 
be a liar and the truth won’t be in me. 
To have come so close only to fail is 
quite painful. 
By this time, a large percentage of my 
classmates had gotten internships with 
some in places as far away as silicon 
valley, California. 
The following month, May marked the 
beginning of summer and most good 
companies were done hiring their summer 
interns yet here I was without a summer 
internship.

To be Continued…

Firecracker Toyeen