These just seem to happen to me far too often. Muse on this:

You’ve just accepted a fantastic internship position. Your application / interview process is over and you’re ready to move on to the next step: finding somewhere to live in a new city. Then something happens that makes you take pause. You get a call from one of the internships you had applied to a month earlier – one you were really interested in. They went over your application and want to schedule an interview. What do you do?

Would you do what I did and politely squeak out a contritely apologetic “I’m so sorry, I’ve already accepted another offer”? Or would you, as my mother recommended, take the interview – for the experience only, of course – knowing you couldn’t take the internship if they offered it? (I know no one out there would take the interview and then backtrack and take the offer if it came.)

It’s another tricky situation, and again, one that I’ve been in before (last semester in DC, no surprises there). It’s funny how these things seem to repeat themselves.

I chose to not to take the interview both times. I’ve always been very into steps, clear progress, and checklists. Applications? Check. Interviews? Check. Offer? Check. Backtracking just doesn’t make sense to me, even for the “experience.” I can’t even stomach the possibility of getting the offer and knowing I would have to turn it down, especially if it was a particularly appealing position at an ideal company. (This is all on top of the fact that I’d be wasting the employers time.) I can, though, see why some people might be tempted to do it anyway to get the experience.

These sticky situations are what makes the internship search so frustrating; it’s not like the college application process where you know at one time what all of your options are. I’ve had to carefully navigate them, but what’s “right” for me might not be “right” for everyone.