Satire/Humor: LinkedIn Inflation Leads to Tech Giant Turmoils
(Jenell Theobald/The Santa Clara)
This opinion article is a satire piece written by Economics major, Saul Johnson ’28.
The growing inaccuracy of Santa Clara University students’ LinkedIn profiles has finally come to a head.
The University’s Career Center is the target of a new lawsuit from the Santa Clara-based tech giant Nvidia, in which the company alleges that the Career Center was an accomplice in the writing of inaccurate student LinkedIn profiles. The lawsuit argues that the “professional” and “results driven” descriptors on the interns’ LinkedIn profiles were misleading to the point of a loss of 53.8 terabytes of proprietary cloud data, which was reportedly valued at roughly 2 billion dollars. The company also claims that the interns’ devices were infected with viruses commonly associated with websites featuring adult content.
Siliconcia Smith, the lead attorney representing Nvidia, explained the rationale behind the lawsuit in a briefing at the Hall of Justice on Tuesday morning. “Look, Nvidia thought they were getting what they read on LinkedIn. Instead, they cost the company a fortune,” she said. “I mean, if you’re an intern at Nvidia, don’t show up so hungover on the first day that you vomit all over the front desk. I guess they can say they really were trying to gain hands-on experience, but Jesus. The Career Center has got to be on top of this stuff.”
The Santa Clara University Career Center fired back in an Instagram story post that was later removed, defending the LinkedIn profiles and arguing that CFO is indeed a real position on the University’s club soccer team. The Career Center also claimed that the interns’ erratic behavior displayed a level of “risk tolerance and entrepreneurship” unique to the Leavey School of Business.
Fizz, an anonymous campus community app, was buzzing in the wake of the reports. Students gossiped about the identity of the interns while expressing confusion over the future credibility of their own LinkedIn profiles.
One post that read “Wait guys, are they going to check if we’re proficient in Excel?” received 1,500 upvotes, making clear that this is a real concern for students. A back and forth between two users discussed whether one of the supposed interns would retain his status in a prominent local fraternity, with one user claiming that, ironically, they’d recently seen him update his LinkedIn profile to include his position as “Philanthropy Chair.” The users wondered if he would retain the honor.
Meanwhile, one Nvidia employee posted on X claiming that the intern in charge of coffee-duty was “among the worst” the company has ever seen, nearly starting a fire in the breakroom by leaving the pot on. The user griped that she had seen “detail-oriented” listed among the intern’s skills on LinkedIn, which made this particularly upsetting. “I fear for the future of the company,” she confessed.
Nvidia is considering offering mental health services to employees who have had similarly traumatic interactions with the interns, including one individual whose car was totaled in the office parking garage. “I guess they couldn’t problem solve how to park,” the victim commented, referring to the problem-solver skill endorsement featured on one of the profiles. The victim wondered who the hell in their right mind would have endorsed the intern like that, and suspected foul play from SCU.
Despite the situation, the Career Center still flooded students’ inboxes throughout the week. One email had the subject line: “The Internship Grind Don’t Stop,” and advertised the 10 best background photos to use for an aesthetic LinkedIn profile. In an exchange with The Santa Clara, the Career Center said it’d prefer to remain silent on the matter for now, but promised to “touch base” and keep TSC “in the loop.”
Santa Clara University Executive Director of Career Development Jeffrey B. Networken made brief comments on the case, denouncing the behavior and adding an explanation of the University’s Jesuit values. The director also expressed a desire to switch the trial date because of its conflict with a Deloitte coffee chat. It remains to be seen whether the University will encourage students to authenticate their LinkedIn accounts to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future.