After scribbling the last bit of information into their blue books last spring, OU students turned in final assignments to their professors and exited classrooms bound for summer break.

The summer’s activities can be pretty typical —students from out of town go home, those living in Norman go to work, yet most usually enjoy the leisure of playing and swimming intermingled with general sloth. There are all kinds of sun-drenched ways to spend time — festivals, cook-outs, vacations.

But summer wasn’t exactly a break from the stress of the spring semester for two OU undergraduates.

Tyler Jones, public relations senior, let his summer plans take him literally across the world. Jones said he began working as a summer intern for an offshore drilling company called Pride International three years ago. The job first led him to Angola, and then to Egypt the following summer.

“I worked on an oil rig located about 90 miles north of Alexandria, where I was basically a roughneck,” he said. “Our main client was a company called British Petroleum, who paid Pride International something like $425,000 a day to operate the rig.”

Jones said the work was demanding, with 12-hour work days for 38 days straight. Despite the intensity of his internship, Jones remembers his experience fondly.

“I loved Egypt,” he said. “The people were nice; the food was different, but not bad. It’s just a completely different way of life over there.”

An international internship also gave Jones a glimpse of other people and cultures.

“It was a totally different world compared to the one I knew in Oklahoma City,” he said. “I gained some new perspectives on Arabic people in general, compared to the misconceptions a lot of people have in the West.”

The international experience was exactly what Jones wanted. But for Morgan Ray, advertising senior, the glamorous life of an MTV intern in California provided her the opportunities she desired.

Ray traveled to Santa Monica, Calif. for her internship with the television station. She found out about the internship through an older friend in her sorority who already worked there, Ray said.

“If you get a million people applying for the same internship with the same application, all it takes is one person to mention your name and give you an advantage over the other,” she said.

Ray worked on advertising sales for VH1 and Nickelodeon, which offered her a unique opportunity to see the advertising world from the inside, she said.

“My job wasn’t your typical idea of an intern,” she said. “I didn’t just go get coffee. I had actual hands-on experience doing advertising, and I sat in on conference calls to New York. They just threw me into the mix, which was great.”