**Recruitment and Santa Monica, as told by our lovely Co-Recruitment Directors, Cade Sugiyama and Sophia Lu!**

Hey Sophia, remember Santa Monica, and the blog post we were supposed to write for it?

Oh yeah of course I remember Santa Monica, but what do you mean by blog post?

Bro, literally we have a blog post that we were supposed to write about a couple months ago.

Huh now that you mention it, I do recall some aggressive slack messages that Charley sent us…

Let’s look back!

*cue wind chimes and look toward the right*

Before Santa Monica though, don’t you think we should give our readers some context?

Watch our recruitment video here!

Ahhh right. So, back in the summer, Sophia and I had started the intern recruitment process, centered around the 🧩 be our missing puzzle piece 🧩 theme. We caught glimpses of the faces of our future, passionate, young spirits in our dreams, but they were still too blurry to see. So, we filmed an Oscar-deserving recruitment video and presented at numerous events and info sessions to try and find our intern class of 2021.

We were so grateful to receive some of the highest number of intern applications that APASA has ever seen, but this made it especially difficult for us to select who would be part of our intern class. After more than 30 hours of interviews, 3 bags of Trader Joe’s Fake Takis, and long nights of deliberations sitting outside Dulce, we were able to find *the* 14 individuals *chefs kiss*. Our E-Boarders welcomed them into APASA through lovely personal messages sent through social media, and the annual Santa Monica Orientation was waiting right around the corner.

That morning, Sophia and I—being the amazing Recruitment Directors we are—decided to spoil our interns with pastries from Sidecar Donuts. Being great role models… we definitely weren’t late to our very first meeting with everyone because of this.

Upon meeting on the Great Lawn, we first instructed everyone not to share their names so that each intern would be able to create a name tag for someone else based on what they thought they looked like. From there, through a series of games, conversations about spirit animals, and cheese curds, the interns got to know each other better before meeting the rest of the E-Board at the metro station.

All of the E-Board was thrilled to see how cute and TALL all of our interns were. After a short metro ride, we finally arrived at Santa Monica!

Once on the beach, we played a few games and shared some snacks that the interns had provided us. It was a day full of dancing, ducking, vrooming, scavenger hunting, and getting pooped on by the flock of seagulls (rip charley).

We ended the day by breaking up into groups and getting ~linner~ at some of the fine restaurants on the Santa Monica Promenade. The metro ride home consisted of happy smiles, naps, and subsequent blackmail pictures of said napping.

*cue wind chimes again*

So, back to the blog post… I know they just wanted to hear about the event itself, but we just wanted to say that even though it’s only been a little over a month, we are still just as excited to work with our interns as we were on that first day of Santa Monica. Like our sunshine in the rain, our Tylenol when we’re in pain, they’re exactly what we need.

In all seriousness, to our interns: Alice, Alison, Anjali, Anthony, David, Jon, Kenneth, Katie L., Katie O., Kylie, So Jung, Taran, Tina and Yusuf, we are so grateful to have you all in our APASA family. We are so excited to watch y’all grow and can’t wait to see all the amazing things you’ll accomplish this next year ❤️

Much love,

Cade and Sophia

Santa Monica 2021 — Welcome to our 2021-2022 APASA Interns!

Recruitment and Santa Monica, as told by our lovely Co-Recruitment Directors, Cade Sugiyama and Sophia Lu!

**Recruitment and Santa Monica, as told by our lovely Co-Recruitment Directors, Cade Sugiyama and Sophia Lu!**