Da Gubermint, Internships

I finally heard back from the federal and city government internships I applied to several months ago.  Surprisingly, they wanted me to take the first parts in the interview process.  For the city internship, I have to take an "exam" to see what knowledge I possess at 8:30 am on a Saturday.  The exam was brutal.  It was four hours long, consisting of two parts with 140 questions total.  It was like taking a final exam that I never studied for. While I believe I did well on the English/grammar portion, the accounting portion was a whole different story.  The accounting portion consisted of knowledge of the laws of government accounting and accounting calculations.  The calculations I can do, but questions regarding laws were nothing more than luck.  Whether I passed or not, I'll find out in a couple of weeks.

For the government internship, I had to do a face to face interview with four different people.  Two of them were assistant managers and the two other were employees.  It was a pretty normal interview process even though it was for a government agency, and like the interview at the large tech company, I didn't stammer that much.  However, I may have given unsatisfactory answers to their questions and I may have actually smiled too much, which may have freaked out the first female interviewer.  My body language and eye contact was decent, aside from what I listed above there wasn't anything of note when I analyzed my own behavior afterwards.  In the end it was okay.

After doing the interviews at the government internship and the tech company, I realized something odd.  I realized that my body doesn't react during the interviews.  I don't sweat, my breathing and heart rate doesn't increase, I don't flinch or twitch or anything physiological that would indicate nervousness. Really weird.  Seems like I conditioned my body better than my mind for situations like interviews.

On another note, the response rate for the internships I applied for have been absolutely disappointing.  I applied to probably a little bit over a dozen now and there has been only one response aside from the government ones.  Ironically, I keep getting responses for full time jobs that I apply to.  Don't understand what's up with that.