(Left to right) Dr. Spitz, Ai Takeuchi '02, and Tuesday the cat

For some college students, summer is a time when the living is easy. For others, it's a time to explore how they might one day earn a living—and find the career for which they are best suited. Employers, as well as students, recognize the benefits of internships. "More than 60 percent of employers plan to maintain or increase student internships, despite the economic slowdown,” wrote Stephanie Armour in a piece titled "Internships Riding out Job Downturn” that ran on USATODAY.com. The reasons for this, Armour reports, are that interns are paid relatively little or nothing and don't receive benefits. In addition, companies view the intern pool as a source of good employees once the economy takes an upswing. According to a 2001 National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) survey, for-profit organizations tend to use internships as recruiting tools, extending full-time offers to 55 percent of interns in the fall semester of their senior year. Nonprofits, with lower budgets and fewer employees, make offers to 5 percent of their interns. And, the survey results indicate, an average of 57.5 percent of summer interns were offered jobs.

More than 100 Mount Holyoke students spent the summer experiencing the world of work, learning new skills, and gaining insight into where their futures may lie. The following is a look at what five interns accomplished while the fish were jumpin' and the cotton was high.

Ai Takeuchi '02
Park East Animal Hospital

"I knew veterinary medicine was moving forward but I didn't realize it's basically the same as human medicine now," says Ai Takeuchi '02, a biological sciences major who interned at the Park East Animal Hospital in New York City this summer. From cleaning cages to assisting in surgeries, Takeuchi was expected to do everything a veterinary technician does. On the job, she learned about new diseases and now wants to begin research to make a vaccine that doesn't require refrigeration. She is also considering writing a thesis on animal public policy and feels more focused because of the work she has done during her internship. "I'm interested in going to a Third World country and enhancing veterinary medicine there. The animals at Park East will be taken care of by any number of vets, but the real help is needed in developing nations, and that's where I want to go."

Natalie Jacuzzi, '03
The New England Primate Center,
Harvard Medical School

Assigned to seven monkeys—Madsen, Quinten, Sid, Hale, Alex, Gatewood, and Jaromir-Natalie Jacuzzi '03 spent her summer caring for the animals and running experiments for a drug abuse/addiction project at Harvard Medical Center's New England Primate Center. Her work as a lab technician involved everything from animal care and implementing experimental techniques to data collection and analysis. "I'm surprised at how much I knew and how often I was able to apply what I've learned at MHC in the past two years," says Jacuzzi. As rewarding as the work was, the internship actually steered the neuroscience and behavior major away from biomedical research. "I realized that my love of science [has more to do with] helping people and reducing suffering at the patient-care level. Now I want to do an internship that involves me directly in patient care."

April Strickland '02
Boston Museum of Fine Arts

When you think of art museums and masterpieces, teenagers aren't the first thing to come to mind—unless you are art history major April Strickland '02. She spent the summer helping to design a new program to attract teens to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Through the museum's Teen Education Program, Strickland helped train a group of high school students to become tour guides for their peers. Working with the students in the museum's galleries, she instructed them on everything from viewing and researching art to public speaking and presentation. Sure that she wants to pursue a career in the art world, Strickland says the internship "showed me how many different opportunities there are, not just in the art world, but in a museum itself; how many things go on behind the scenes."

Jill Graboski '03
Mystic Seaport Museum

A history major with a self-created minor in museum education, Jill Graboski '03 spent ten weeks this summer as a graduate-level intern in museum studies at Connecticut's Mystic Seaport Museum. For the work-study portion of her internship, she focused on museum education, working on a variety of exhibits and activities geared toward children and families. Her duties ranged from teaching children maritime skills such as tying knots, building barrels, and furling a ship's sail to instructing them about estuary life in the Mystic River by catching fish with nets. She also performed stories about nineteenth-century children at sea and taught visitors about toys and games from that time. The internship included a weekly seminar that focused on museum-related careers, during which interns met with museum staff to discuss their responsibilities and career paths. Graboski also had weekly reading assignments on museum work and visited nearby museums to see how they operated. She compiled reading lists for a number of thematic seaport school tours and co-instructed a summer history camp with a locally renowned middle school teacher. "It was an incredible experience working at the seaport this summer. This internship helped me realize that I definitely want to work as a museum educator after graduation. All my life I have enjoyed hands-on experiences. and as a museum educator I will be able to make history come alive for young people."

Eva Kamau '02
UN Development Program

Since she is from a developing country, Kenya, economics major Eva Kamau considers herself "a stakeholder” in the arena of development (social, political, and economic), and doing an internship at the United Nations Development Program's head office in New York was a natural. Working as a research associate, she focused on two major projects revolving around developing countries—researching policies that donors use when giving technical assistance and examining reform in the security sector to determine if the police and military are positive forces within society. No stranger to the UN, Kamau spent January Term working as an intern at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Nairobi. A high point of her summer internship was attending receptions for Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the UN, and Daniel arap Moi, president of Kenya. Her plans include graduate school in economic development or public policy, with the goal of working for, you guessed it, the United Nations.