I'm annoyed.

I have an internship that requires me to get a federal security clearance. In that, I had to fill out a work history going back to when I was 16. I found out that verification letters are being mailed to all of those businesses. That's fine, except for the fact that I'm pretty sure the custard stand I worked at for a month (and jobs like that one) when I was 16 aren't going to remember crap about me, and so probably won't vouch for me not being a threat to national security.

On top of that, one of the people I put down as a character reference was one of my high school teachers (actually, I had her for classes from 7th grade thorough senior year) and she is, for some reason, afraid of filling out the reference sheet that was mailed to her. So now I have to try to contact them and tell them to use another person.

This annoys me. Hopefully, it won't jepoardize me passing the security screening.

I'm sure there's other people on Seek who've gotten security clearances. Did any of you deal with issues like this, and if so, how'd it work out? I've never done anything like this before, and so I'm pretty paranoid about any issues that come up with it. They've already made me re-do the whole thing once before (apparently, one person can't verify that you've lived at two different addresses).

I had to get a federal clearance for my coming internship...but there weren't really any complications. Any information they needed that I didn't provide they got when their agent came to interview me.

I was actually quite surprised when I found out that everyone I had put on my list to contacted was actually contacted. Everyone. I had absolutely no kinks with mine though. Either everyone did what they were supposed to or the government didn't care.

So does posting on Seek count for or against?

I had to screen for top secret when I joined the Navy. The investiagor tracked down the girl I was dating at the time who I hadn't really told anyone else about. They are pretty good at what they do. I had a spot on my record about getting arrested for "assault with a cream pie" and they had lots of questions about that. Otherwise wasn't much of a hassle.

"Assult with a creame pie" sounds interesting . . . do share . . .

In October of 2001 (I think) there were some bored students at Wal-mart late at night looking at the halloween masks. Somehow the idea came about that it would be really funny to get a couple of masks and some black clothes and make a video of all of the RAs getting hit in the face with a cream pie. So over the next few nights we got six or seven of them. Most of them had a pretty good idea who was doing it (I and one of the other people involved had a certain reputation for harassing Res Life) but they couldn't prove it. Unfortunately, one of the RAs that we hit didn't think it was very funny and called the campus rent-a-cops. We were trying to get one more RA that night and we happened to be walking down the street outside of the Quad when the cop walked out of the building after interviewing the RA. We were wearing black, with masks, and a cream pie, with a video camera. Couldn't really claim "it wasn't us". Ultimately charges were dropped. I did get to sit in the Quad for an hour in handcuffs though. It was a good time.

You'll be fine. They really won't care too much about the custard place for a month and if you can't get references to respond with information they will a) talk to them in person b) talk to someone else.

One of my previous roommates got an internship needing a security clearance a few years ago, and has an internship lined up with the FBI stuff this year. She used me as a reference, and it was pretty easy. The first time, I just had to fill out some paperwork. This year, an actual FBI agent came and talked to me about her.

It would have been nice if she had told me what was going to happen, but overall, it wasn't a hassle really. They worked around my schedule, and I got quite a bit of fun out of taking it completely out of context and telling people the FBI was after me.

It's not really a big deal. They just want to know that you haven't done any serious crap, and you can handle working with sensitive data if you have to.