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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Our company has an MOU with a university which means we get a lot of interns, including short-term interns who are doing the work for credit as a experiential portion of a class.  These latter often have a very wide range of behavior/soft skills.  This prof is giving good advice--it's sort of astonishing how hard parents work to get their kid into a good college, but don't focus as much on relatively easier basics  which will make it more likely they are successful with work and will get a good recommendation.  The vast majority of interns are academically/intellectually strong enough--what differentiates them is not who is more brilliant, but who is reliable, basically self-aware and can pick up on the very basics of code-switching (i.e. you don't talk to your clients or boss the way you talk to your friends).  There are some students that I can tell are likely competent and probably just need to grow up a bit, but I'm not going to put my reputation on the line recommending them for further opportunities if they lack basic work etiquette and don't seem to pick it up in the short term intern class stint.  So for some students the experiential learning stint leads to further opportunities and for others it closes the doors. And this is not a SN thing, in my experience many of the students on the spectrum/ADHD tend to work a bit more at this because they are often a little more nervous and so they are more careful to dress well, pay attention to the norms, try to be organized.  They are likely to ask questions to confirm they are doing good work. It's the ones who think they have nothing they need to work on, who are blasé about the work, that are the ones who are often the most problematic.  And they are killing their chances to get the strongest recommendations from their profs and short-term intern supervisors (the recommendation forms typically ask about intellectual skills and academic skills, and more soft skills/dispositions around social interactions/leadership/conscientiousness).   And for those who thought private/public school background is a key factor--I don't think that's accurate.  In my personal experiences, some of the biggest offenders are UMC young men--many of whom come from private HS--and the university we work with is a private school that tends to skew UMC.  Maybe they are just confident they will have opportunities no matter what, but it seems a waste to me.

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+1 My public school college freshman just went to an  internship fair, and the recruiters there found them to be very professional in their interactions.  They chatted for a while with my DC.

DC was in a debate team in HS, and thinks this really helped with public speaking.  DH is very into manners, and we both agreed that our kids needed to be taught how to speak properly to adults and authority figures.

DC said some of their friends don't seem to know how to speak to adults whom they are not familiar with.

I've told my kids that their teachers will be more inclined to be lenient with you if you are respectful to them, and that includes speaking to them without your earbuds, making eye contact, and not speaking to them like they are your friends.

When I joke around with my kids it's fine for them to talk to me like I'm their friend, but when we have a serious conversation, I tell them to not speak to me like I'm their friend. They need to have situational awareness.[/quote]

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