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You quickly learn that 50+ hour weeks are the norm for interns, with full-time engineers sometimes working even longer hours. You are given ownership of projects, which means you have to move fast and pick up new skills rapidly. The work is extremely rewarding though, and I got to meet and work with some of the brightest engineers I have met so far in my career. Overall, the atmosphere is a fast-paced one, and I don't think I was ever bored, or feeling bottlenecked by any external factor.

Not specifically Tesla-related, but I found that the housing situation for interns in the Bay Area can get rather dicey, especially when you don't have much of a rental history (college student living with parents, not much credit history, etc...), so moving in and actually finding a decent deal was difficult. Also, transportation around the Peninsula can be lacking, as it's mainly a patchwork of various public transit systems and company shuttles. I would say that Tesla's company shuttles were amazing, and definitely helped, along with biking and occasional driving.

• I didn't personally interact with him, but I don't have any reason to have any negative impressions of him as a person
• While I was interning at Tesla, I didn't really see anything specifically about the low-cost vehicle (I was mainly working on Model S-related refinements). I'm sure it was/is somewhere on the pipeline (hence all the news about the Gigafactory, etc.), and cost-down opportunities were always something in the back of our minds, but beyond that I don't know any design details specific to that concept.

I am under 25, so I couldn't officially walk into a store asking for a test-drive of a Model S, but someone in Marketing did allow me to test-drive his Roadster through the back roads of Palo Alto

1) Definitely would like to return as a full-timer, given my experiences as an intern and the general amount of new stuff that's always going on/around the corner. 2) I didn't hear a lot along those lines (interns don't get stock options, so we didn't really deal with that a lot). 3) Although I wasn't directly involved in anything relating to the fires/subsequent investigations, I would say the blog postings on Tesla's website in the weeks following the fires were a fairly accurate representation of the general opinions I heard from my colleagues. 4) While actively on the job, it tends to be hard to necessarily "romanticize" in the sort of way a Megafactories documentary might do so, but I would say I always felt like I had a purpose and was contributing significantly to something big.