“It doesn’t sound like a test to me- it sounds like a coordinator on the recruiting team was told, “Here are the kids coming in for internship interviews. Work with them to make their travel arrangements”. The coordinator saw that one can go in and out of Atlanta on the same day- and figuring this student didn’t want to miss two days of classes, booked the “in and out”.”
I completely agree with blossom’s interpretation of events.
I fly in and out of Philly for one-day trips frequently for my client there. My clients know that they need to schedule the meetings for the middle of the day – so I can fly in and fly out the same day. The fact that I take a 6 am flight that gets in at 9 am, and then I leave that evening on a flight that gets me back to my home airport at 9:30 pm doesn’t even remotely register with them (oh noes, she worked more than 9 - 5!), and they care not whether I live 15 minutes or 90 minutes from the airport. Nor should they, really. My travel woes are not their problem.
^^ Ditto. I regularly fly from ORD to SFO in the am (leaving to get to the airport around 5:30am), lead a number of focus group sessions, and fly out on the redeye that night, getting in at approximately 6:00am the next morning. Do I work a full day the next day? Not usually. I sleep on the plane. I respond to emails in the airport. I write topline reports in the boarding area. I take a cab instead of driving myself so fatigue isn’t an issue when it comes to driving. (And I’m almost 60 years old…way past the days of college all-nighters and the like.) But that’s sort SOP for my industry…and in a lot of others, from what I know.
I strongly recommend getting a hotel room by the airport for the night after the interview. I also encourage your daughter to figure out ground transport in the interview city ahead of time (e.g., will she need to take a cab or is there convenient and timely public transit) and, if your own time permits, allow you to help her to book a different flight if either of the originally scheduled ones is cancelled. This happened to my daughter a few times last year, and I think she appreciated my assistance, for example, in getting her a new flight back from the interview city after the originally scheduled flight was cancelled while she was at the interview.
Agree with old fort. Since the interview is important and presumably goes from 8 - 5, you do run the risk of arriving late due to flight delays, etc. Hopefully, kid will be flying ATL to SFO nonstop so will be less likely delays due to weather. I think it’s reasonable to ask earlier on in the process if you could arrive a day early and stay in a motel, and if the company says that they don’t want to pay for the cost, then the kid could offer to pay the cost of the motel. But it will probably work out just great. In reality, a 16 hr day will prep kid for real world work when a deadline is looming in the computer industry.
She’s not going to SFO and back in one day, is she? That would be nuts, and almost impossible as it is a 5 hour flight each way, and she wouldn’t be landing at 9 pm, more like 9 am. I think the SFO reference was to others flying for business, not the OP’s daughter. I sure hope so.
Agree with @oldfort about UG interviews for internships. My D is a UG at Carnegie Mellon, had an on campus internship prelim interview (at Career Fair) on Wed (2/11) and they called her Wednesday night and scheduled an hour long campus interview for Thursday (2/12) in which she gladly missed a class for, and then received a call Friday morning for an in-person interview at the company in North Carolina for Monday. Bam, bam, bam: it’s a whirlwind. They made all travel and hotel etc for her. IMHO, you do what you have to do. No complaining about it.
I have a client in Atlanta and one in Minneapolis and I do in and outs regularly from ORD or MDW. Up at 3 AM, leave the house at 4 AM, back home by 9 or 10 PM. It’s tiring, but that’s life. I hear you @pizzagirl!
My son did these kinds of interviews: for a job, it seems, the company pays for a hotel the night before, but for an internship, just the flight! I think the original poster’s daughter could consider a hotel room near the airport the night before, which would mean getting up at 4:30 or 5 instead of 3am. Does she tend to sleep on planes? A room on the way back is a good idea too. How far to school? Two nights will be expensive, so choose one or pay for both depending on your assessment of safety.
You mentioned she wants to sleep in her own bed. If she cannot usually sleep in a hotel room, and if she’s not the type to develop bad habits, I would suggest using a little Benadryl to sleep (one children’s chewable dose knocks me out) but the effect is not over for 4-6 hours so she would need to be careful about timing.
Benadryl knocks some people out (like me) and makes other people jittery and hyper (like my daughter) so I would not recommend trying it unless you know what effect it has on you!
What works well for me is Motrin PM. There was a time last year when I would wake up at 3 or 4 and couldn’t go back to sleep. I would take a half dosage of it and sleep very well for few hours.
However, an experienced business traveler may be more used to such travel, and more able to handle travel problems and delays (e.g. rebooking if a flight is delayed), while a novice traveler like a student heading to an interview at a company site may be more likely to encounter trouble during travel.
I have known novice travelers to make the following travel mistakes:
Did not check in on the web site, and got to the airport check in desk or kiosk one minute past the check in deadline for their flight.
Not realize what a code share is, resulting in check in problems and delays.
Wear clothing with a lot of metal, triggering security check alarms, causing delays there.
Check more baggage than they needed to, resulting in delays collecting it at the end, including getting lost or misdirected.
Choose suboptimal ground transportation for the trip by not looking into all of the options.
In other words, the risk of travel problems for a novice traveler student going to an interview is probably higher than for an experienced traveler who does this kind of travel for a living.
Of course, it could give the student a taste of what some kinds of travel-heavy jobs are like, and whether she would be ok with such jobs.
Do not travel the morning of anything important…and do not take the last flight out at night to your destination.
Our kid just had an interview that was on a Friday. There was a reception on Thursday night. She flew out there wednesday. It’s winter. We wanted her to get there. She flew back on Saturday, taking an early flight.
Yes…she missed three days of work…but we didn’t have to worry about her getting there or not.
For a student, I would suggest flying out as early in the afternoon as possible the previous day. Get TO the site of the interview the night before…and get a good nights sleep. Then you aren’t scurrying around in the morning.
After the interview, fly home. If it’s really too late, then get a hotel near the airport and drive the rest of the way in the morning.
One other thing is that the frequent business travelers are more likely to have elite status on airlines and hotels, so they tend to be insulated from the worst effects of travel problems. E.g. flight cancelled – elite status traveler rebooked on the next one an hour later, while the non-status traveler (like the student going on an interview) spends the night in the airport because the next available flight for people of his/her non-status is the next day.
During one of my daughter’s interview trips last year, while she was at the interview, her return flight was cancelled. I was checking the status of the flight and noticed almost right away, so I started looking for other options. The only choice with the original airline was a flight the next day. I was able to book her a flight on Southwest. Because of Southwest’s policies, we could have cancelled the ticket and received a full refund if she didn’t use the ticket (in this instance, because of not making it to the airport on time). She got out of her interview, checked her phone, got my message about the change, and jumped into a cab right away. She made it to the airport for the earlier, Southwest flight and made it back that evening. And I am now an amateur travel agent.
Roser…you were lucky. Last year my kid was with us at a family funeral. His SW flight was cancelled on a Friday, ams no rebooking was available until Tuesday. He booked the Tuesday SW flight, and then went walking to the ticket counters. He was able to get on a Delta flight that was leaving in less than an hour…and had not been cancelled. For only $600 one way, he got back to the sunny southwest and his work.
He had to call SW to bank the miles…and when he did, they told him they had cancelled all of the Tuesday flights too…which was why he had to call. Next rebooking was Friday. If he hadn’t taken the $600 flight, he would have been stranded for a week.
Ha ha, I’m happy to convey my knowledge of travel arrangements to anyone who is interested! In addition to having much experience booking airline tickets, I’m acquainted with all ground-transport possibilities in eastern Minnesota and southern California. My supreme achievement was figuring out how to get my older daughter back to southern California from the middle of Arkansas on very short notice; the most frustrating was spending a few hours on the phone with a series of agents for an online booking company, while also comforting our ailing dog, who ended up dying early the next morning. But some of this did rub off, I think; my older daughter traveled around the world by herself after graduating, and she did everything herself, except the first flight, which I booked.