Intrepid Pursuits User Experience Design Apprentice interview questions

Intrepid Pursuits exploits young professionals. They told me that their on-site interview would be fully paid for but refuses to refund me for the rides I had to take to get to their office. I am a college student. I don't have much money and would have refused the interview if I had to front any costs. A company that steals money from already broke college students? No thank you. If you are reading this and thinking about the apprenticeship program, I advise you to look elsewhere. The pay is very poor, and even if you do receive a full-time offer (not guaranteed), the salary is still very little! The overall process started with a phone call with the recruiter, a phone call with a designer, and then the on-site interview. The recruiter was clearly overworked. She missed our first interview completely, had to reschedule, called late the second time, and was frequently sending me emails late at night. The on-site interview wasn't booked and confirmed until the day I was scheduled to arrive in Boston! And when I showed up, she wasn't even there! Always late and overall unprofessional. I met with 6 designers at the on-site interview, none of which were the people the recruiter told me I'd be interviewing with. This made me feel like they were just throwing me anyone they could get. I felt good about half of these designers, and the other half were trite and didn't have much information/experience to offer about the company. If you are a designer and are anxious about finding a job, trust me, I know how hard it is. But what I hate more is seeing companies like Intrepid Pursuits take advantage of young new grads who are desperate to find a job. That was me when I applied, and I eventually got an offer that is full time, pays far more than what Intrepid is offering, and I know that the company isn't just using young people as cheap way to get work done. If you are excited by the claim that this is a "good learning opportunity", please know that any position is a good learning opportunity. If you want to learn about being a young professional, you don't want to be learning from a company that reeks of unprofessionalism.

I had a screener with HR that lasted about an hour. They set up a phone interview with a senior designer on the team for the following week. All of the interview questions to this point had been normal interview questions for design: describing your process, experience with different platforms, walking through a portfolio piece. I was given a design challenge to complete that weekend and didnt hear back for 2 weeks. When I contacted them about it, they said they forgot to respond and that I wasnt a strong candidate for the apprentice program...which was fine but when I asked for a critique of my design challenge and some feedback on where it fell short or how I could improve, I didnt even get a response. Definitely not a company that I would want to work for.