How My Mentor Misled Me About a Return Offer

I’m a CS PhD student graduating this year, actively job hunting. Earlier this year, during interviews, a mentor from a team told me they’d “likely have headcount this year” and that he had a lot of influence in the decision. Believing him, I stopped other interviews and joined his team as a intern.

From the start, I poured a lot of time into my project. We had multiple syncs every week, I often worked late, and honestly got close to burnout. By mid-June, the project was going smoothly and we had promising results — enough to aim for a paper submission. I asked my mentor about a return offer. He told me to wait until August or September, after the paper was written, before talking to the manager about headcount.

I felt uneasy waiting that long (since it would delay my job search), so at the end of June I asked the manager directly. The answer? No headcount this year. I told my mentor, and his response was: “By September or October there won’t be any openings, so better finish the paper first and maybe start looking around Christmas.” He also suggested he could refer me to another team “that might have headcount.” At this point, I was already suspicious.

In the last two months, my mentor asked me to make a condensed version of my project slides — from motivation to results — supposedly to help “outline the paper.” I was busy and delayed it a few weeks. Then, in the final month, he pushed again but with a new reason: the slides were needed to “apply for extra GPU resources” because they were “tight on GPUs.” Later, I learned from the manager that those GPUs were mostly idle. He also insisted I use the company template and send it to him for edits… I sent it to the whole group and never heard back from him about edits.

After my internship ended, I told him I wouldn’t continue because I was busy. Then I heard he told the manager I was unhappy because I didn’t get a return offer. In my view, that’s not the case — but is this a misunderstanding, or was I just misled from the start?