Summer Provides Intern Experience

With copious amounts of free time on their hands over the summer, some Exonians were able to pursue their curiosities in a wide range of disciplines through the Academy’s internship program and Student Council’s Summer Fellowship Program. Both programs are funded by the Academy and were instituted as ventures to provide students equal access to a myriad of opportunities for research, service or intern experience.The intern program was established two summers ago and is sustained through the connections alumni can provided to the Academy, according to Director of Global Initiatives Eimer Page. “They [the alumni] are generally the ones that make us aware of these opportunities. There is no reliance on family connections,” she said.The competition for the coveted positions was fierce, and Page emphasized the importance of the selection process so that students would be beneficial to the organizations.“It really is a program of distinction for students who are performing exceptionally well in the disciplines involved with their internship,” she said. “These [internships] are like an overview of a certain career path, and we want our students to be helpful to their involved organization, not needing a lot of babysitting. It just relies on how interested the student is in that subject matter and if they have the accomplishments to demonstrate it.”This spring, five selected students participated in one of three different summer internships offered within the U.S.—two at the Conservation Law Foundation [CLF] in New England, two at the Seung Kim Laboratory in Stanford, and one at the Academy of American Poets in New York.Senior Alice Ju participated in the Conservation Law Foundation internship, which appealed to her interests in both law and public policy as well as in environmental work. “I’ve spent the past few summers working in environmental activism, but CLF was very different because it considers the legal aspects of environmental regulation,” she said.While working in CLF’s Concord office, Ju was involved with several projects that directly concerned New Hampshire, including The Northern Pass, a proposed transmission line that would transport energy to New Hampshire through the White Mountains, and a permit to regulate storm water runoff into Great Bay.The experience exposed Ju to the realities of environmental policy. “I’ve talked a lot about environmental regulation in class, especially 333, and Republican Club, and in those situations it’s really easy to make a blanket judgment of what the government should or shouldn’t do, policy-wise,” she said. “The reality is that everything is a lot more complex than you would think sitting at the Harkness table, and a lot of factors need to be considered.”Senior Davis Leonard, on the other hand, was drawn to the six-week internship with the Academy of American Poets. During the internship, she enjoyed a hands-on experience of working in a poetry organization, with duties such as picking poems for monthly newsletters, writing bibliographies for poets, and helping with a high school poetry workshop the Academy was offering.“What was wonderful was that no matter what task I was doing, I was exposed constantly to poetry upon poetry. A day spent picking poems for next month’s newsletter was a day reading through hundreds of poems until I could find the ones that best suited the given theme,” Leonard said. “I loved working in an office where everyone was so dedicated to celebrating and pushing forward this wonderful art, and I could see myself working as an editor or poet in the future.”In the case of the Stanford biomedical research internship, seniors Anika Ayyar and Elle MacAlpine interned directly under alumnus Dr. Seung Kim ’81, a professor in the Stanford Department of Developmental Biology and Medicine and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.Ayyar initially built a connection with Kim in the summer of 2011, while she was working at a different lab in Stanford. “We talked a lot about Exeter, my interest in biology and both of our interest in creating a collaboration between Stanford and Exeter that introduced students to hands-on research,” she said. “After that conversation…we laid the groundwork for the BIO470 course along with Mr. Chisholm and Ms. Rankin.”Over the summer of 2012, Ayyar worked in Kim’s lab preparing fly stocks for and preparing to teach the BIO470 course along with Chisholm and Rankin the next spring. MacAlpine and Ayyar were the two students in BIO470 selected to intern last summer in Kim’s lab.The internship was originally only supposed to last two weeks but was extended an additional four weeks. “The only con of the experience was the extra time the experience took; that being said, those extra four weeks were not wasted time,” MacAlpine said. “From that experience I learned that in a lab, hardly anything happens as quickly as you expect it to, and certainly not as quickly as you would like. We did not do experiments written out in a high school textbook with a predetermined outcome; we performed real experiments where we didn’t know what would happen.”As the Academy’s already popular internship program continues to gain momentum, its offerings will encompass a broader variety of opportunities in future years. Page said, “The program expanded a little bit since last year and will be expanding for next year. We will probably be offering a course in computer science and one in current affairs and journalism.”Student Council’s summer fellowship program, meanwhile, provides the opportunity for students to pursue individual research projects. Senior Kieran Minor chose to volunteer at a nonprofit recording studio and music school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti called Konbit Mizik.Healing through music appealed to Minor, who has worked as a DJ and GM for the WPEA radio station on campus, and the experience did not disappoint. “It was an incredible, eye-opening experience. Skills I had learned at Exeter were applied to the outside world, such as crafting thoughtful questions, using another language to communicate, and recording a scene based on observations,” he said.The fellowship also allowed Minor to introduce the Academy to the groups and individuals he interacted with at the studio. “I think my fellowship, along with my colleagues, will help with Principal Hassan's greater mission of diversifying the campus, and making Exeter a more globally-minded place.”