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Tesla is revoking summer internship offers as the automaker grapples with layoffs.
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One college senior said she was disappointed to lose her internship weeks before her start date.
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Brook Gura said she turned down offers at other companies in favor of working at Tesla.
A college senior who scored a prestigious Tesla internship is scrambling to make new professional plans after the automaker revoked her offer less than three weeks before she was supposed to start.
Brook Gura, 21, was looking forward to spending her summer as a recruiting intern in Tesla’s human-resources department, she told Business Insider this week. The senior at the University of Texas at Austin said she spent about three weeks interviewing with the company earlier this year before signing a contract with Tesla on February 29. BI viewed part of Gura’s offer letter from Tesla.
“It was exciting. I was looking for a big corporate internship,” Gura said. “And it was close by. I wouldn’t have had to relocate.”
Gura, who said she turned down internship offers at other companies in favor of Tesla, was particularly stoked about the compensation — $26 an hour, she said.
The 12-week internship was scheduled to start on May 20. Gura said she was told she would get more information about picking up a company laptop the first week of May.
When Tesla announced layoffs last month affecting 10% of the company’s workforce, Gura wasn’t initially worried, she said.
“Interns are relatively cheap compared to full-time employees,” she said. “I figured if they were trying to cut down, I might even be working more.”
But Gura said that as she was studying for finals on Tuesday, she got a call from an unknown phone number. A couple of hours later, she received an email from a Tesla recruiter asking her to call back.
Gura said she immediately panicked and went online to see whether the company had done more layoffs, which was when she saw a LinkedIn post from another intern who’d lost their offer.
Source Agencies
