Today marks the last day of my summer internship at Yahoo!, so I thought I’d commemorate the occasion by going on a quest worthy of a fourth “Lord of the Rings” installment. I set out to single-handedly solve the most perplexing of Yahoo! mysteries: Who are the interns? Where do they come from? What are their experiences, and what have they been doing this summer at Yahoo!?

Time was certainly not on my side, so rather than spying on the rookie Yahoos in their cube-shaped habitats, I put together a detailed survey and forced the interns to answer my questions. (Frodo would’ve been proud.)

And here are the results! I present to you: Interns — by the numbers:

4 – Number of interns at Yahoo! headquarters who accidentally walked into the wrong bathroom in another building. (A bit of trivia: When the architects designed Yahoo!’s headquarters, they simply flipped the blueprints for Building B, a mirror image of our other buildings, rather than redrawing them. This means the men’s and women’s bathrooms are on different sides than in the rest of the buildings!)


5 – Number of high-school interns. (Start ’em young…)


16 – Number of interns for whom this summer marks their second internship at Yahoo!. (Maybe we’ll see the number go up next year?)


31 – Number of interns who’ve been at work in the middle of the night at least once this summer. (Yahoo! never sleeps.)


35 – Number of interns who still don’t know what the acronym “Yahoo!” stands for. (For those of you still scratching your heads, it stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”)


38 – Percentage of interns working at Yahoo! headquarters who had never been to Silicon Valley until this summer.


45 – Percentage of interns who participated in a Yahoo! for Good activity.


49 – Number of interns who were involved in a product launch this summer.


71 – Number of interns who blog.


85 – Number of interns who played foosball at least once every week during their internship.


127 – Number of interns who were not born in the United States.


135 – Number of technical Yahoo! interns.


156 – Number of interns who are in graduate school.


229 – Number of interns legally old enough to drink beer in the United States. (I’ve still got three years to go!)


260 – Number of interns working at Yahoo! this summer. (More than 180 of these interns work at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. The rest are at other Yahoo! campuses like Burbank and Santa Monica, California; Toronto, Canada; or New York City.)


317 – Sightings of cofounder Jerry Yang by the interns so far this summer.


537 – Sightings of cofounder David Filo by the interns so far this summer. (Jerry’s got some catching up to do!)


1,090 – Cups of free coffee consumed by the interns each week. (Don’t worry! That’s only about 4 cups a week per intern — although one fellow did report drinking an average of 20 cups each week!)


And lastly...

12,875 – Days worked collectively by all interns this summer. (That’s the equivalent of one Yahoo working more than 35 years!)

Doreen Bloch
Yodel Anecdotal Intern

Editor's Note: Fare thee well, Doreen — possibly the most fearless 18-year-old I've known. Good luck at Cal (Go Bears!) and thanks for all the research, writing, moderating, and keeping us connected with our inner cool. Yodel on.
- Nicki