One week, while scrolling through my school inbox, I received a Handshake email titled “Your weekly jobs round-up.” It was the usual friendly nudge, a list of suggested internships tailored to my career interests. 

Among the listings was a software company called Palantir, marked with a small graphic reading “$10k/mo.” It looked like a great opportunity: enticingly lucrative, easy to apply to and right up my alley. A quick Google search would tell otherwise. 

Palantir is not a standard data analytics company. On its official website, Palantir advertises military software through an artificial intelligence tank that can “reduce time from sensor to shooter” and “enable long-range precision fires for the modern battlespace.” The U.S. government has paid the company hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts, including for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use AI to locate targets for deportations. 

None of that is visible on Handshake. Safe to say I closed that application tab. 

Palantir represents a broader pattern of ethically controversial companies recruiting college students through friendly internship portals and generous salaries. A glance at the University’s “Who Recruits at USC?” webpage reveals defense contractors, fossil fuel companies and for-profit health insurance conglomerates among its regular recruiters.

On campus, brand-name internships in these categories are treated as markers of ambition and success. Internships are often the first time we are trained to treat ethics as completely irrelevant to our labor. 

One of the aforementioned “Who Recruits at USC?” companies is the Chevron Corporation — one of the world’s largest legacy oil and gas suppliers. Chevron is consistently ranked by independent climate researchers as one of the top corporate contributors to global fossil-fuel emissions. 

The company has spent decades entangled in environmental controversy, including long-running litigation brought by Indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon over alleged pollution linked to oil operations. 

Expectedly, none of the company’s history makes it to Chevron’s internship page. It smooths environmental destruction into banal corporate language about “growth” and “innovation,” packaged as an “inclusive work experience that values uniqueness and diversity.”

The work itself will struggle to feel unethical. If you intern at Palantir or Chevron, you will be in an air-conditioned office building in the Bay Area, one of the most affluent regions in the world, synonymous with innovation. Your duties will be writing code, running market research and attending “lunch and learns.” You’ll run cost-benefit analyses on projects whose consequences you’ll never have to witness. 

The end product of your PowerPoints and spreadsheets — pollution, displacement, denial, violence — exists somewhere else, handled by someone else, at a scale abstract enough to feel unreal. 

In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” philosopher Hannah Arendt introduced the idea of “the banality of evil” to describe how great harm can be carried out not by sadistic actors, but by ordinary people who uncritically perform their roles in harmful systems. The danger lies less in malice than in thoughtlessness: a failure to examine the morality of one’s actions or consider what one’s work actually enables. 

This is what the modern corporate ecosystem executes so perfectly. As an intern, you’re not the one releasing toxic waste into neighborhoods or standing at a smoke stack venting carcinogens into the air. You’re not the one denying insurance claims to a single mother. You’re not firing mechanical weapons. You’re in a pleasant, bland office carrying out benign corporate activities. 

Modern institutions fragment labor so thoroughly that harm is diffused across roles. No single person feels directly responsible, and responsibility itself becomes abstract. 

Internships are evaluated almost exclusively in terms of pay and prestige. The prevailing attitude around internships on campus is dominated by networking and hustle culture. Any internship at an S&P 500 company will get you an influx of LinkedIn congratulations, even if the company specializes in knocking over kids’ ice cream cones. 

Considering USC’s recent decision to allow ICE to attend recruitment events for law school students, and Northrop Grumman, a major weapons manufacturer, sponsoring the Viterbi School of Engineering’s annual summer engineering camp for middle schoolers, it’s unlikely ethical pressure is going to come from the University. 

In fact, in response to criticism for allowing ICE recruitment, Gould Dean Franita Tolson defended the decision, stating, “providing professional support is a top priority at our law school.” From the institutional point of view, career access, not ethical scrutiny, remains the priority.

The lack of academic, social, and financial penalties for participating in this process is precisely why the responsibility falls inward. 

No one is stopping you from taking your bright mind and talents to war profiteering. That freedom is precisely why internships with institutions connected to state surveillance, warfare or ecological destruction deserve the same scrutiny we apply to other forms of political and ethical participation. 

This spring, think carefully about where you send your applications. And maybe skip the company named after the all-seeing crystal ball used by Sauron.