The internship—a spell of cv-burnishing work experience--is now ubiquitous across America and beyond. This year young Americans will complete perhaps one million 31 placements; Google alone recruited 3,000 interns this summer, 32 them the chance to “do cool things that matter”. Brussels and Luxembourg are the summer homes of 1,400 stagiaires, 33 embryonic Eurocrats, doing five-month spells at the European Commission. The “Big Four” audit companies—Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers(PWC)—will 34 more than 30,000 interns this year. Bank of China runs an eight-week program (“full of contentment, yet indescribable”, according to an intern 35 on its website); Alibaba, a Chinese online-retailing behemoth, has a global scheme. Infosy, an Indian tech giant, brings 150 interns from around the world to Bangalore each year.