Last week, we said get the hell out goodbye to our first and last Elasticity intern class. Not that we had any doubts we got lucky, but Intern Chris and resident nerd Intern Ken were outstanding additions to our team, they tolerated the verbal abuse grind of the tasks assigned to them, and they screwed up often excelled beyond our expectations. 

But true to our laziness culture and people principles at Elasticity, this wasn’t a typical intern experience. We’re all equals here: intern, partner, bathroom attendant, and event that troll with the spotty beard and limp living under Brian’s desk.

Intern Chris and Intern Ken didn’t spend hour after hour washing our bathrobes recreating 10-page media lists and badgering the hell out of pitching reporters. They were worthless a key part of our strategy discussions and added very little immense value to our approach.

Why?

Because for the most part, those of us in the new media space who aren’t liars have had to alter our worldview over these last four years to understand the balance between traditional media, the blogosphere, social media, other emerging digital communications tools — and figure out how they all fit and work together.

These knuckleheads fine youngsters, however, intuitively live it. It’s instinctual. They don’t really know anything else. A newspaper to a 22-year-old is like good looks to me — utterly foreign.

That’s why when my life partner Dan attended a digital media seminar a few years back put on by the Kellogg School and Media Management Center at Northwestern University, he came back and told our co-workers that, if anything, what we really needed to be doing was listening to the interns.

Of course, we were at one of the big agencies at the time and people looked at Dan like he was crazy and he was taken into the men’s room and splashed with toilet water until he relented this claim.

Why write a blog post about this?

A number of reasons, I’d imagine, starting with the fact that we can learn so much more about today’s media environment from a smart college student than we can from a 20-year veteran reporter turned PR flack with an inflated sense of self importance.

Or maybe it was simply because the nerd Intern Ken was kind enough to send us a note yesterday in which he wrote:

“I learned so much and it was really a result of all of you taking the time to teach, but also being willing to give an intern actual work.  I looked forward to coming in the office everyday this summer mostly a result of the great working environment … I had friends that spent the entire summer traveling around Europe and I have absolutely zero regrets. I would choose working for you guys for a summer over that any day.”

No, Ken, it was us that have zero regrets. And while there’s no way in hell any of us would pass on Europe to spend even a moment with anyone we know — it was a privilege and honor to have you as part of our team, to watch you grow and excel, and to call you a nerd on a daily basis.