Hodson Internship Reports, St. John's College, Annapolis: Summer 2023 by St. John's College

Hodson Internship Reports

Summer 2023 Annapolis, Maryland

Hodson Internship Reports Summer 2023 Table of Contents

Page

Overview of Hodson Internship Projects

Abhigya Adhikari ’26

Rylee Bain ’25

Geffen Bendavid ’25

Peter Boersema ’24

Caleb Briggs ’25

Carolynn Ceci ’24

Valerie Cohen ’26

Marshall Cooperman ’24

Joseph Cunningham ’23

Emma Cunningham-Bradshaw ’25

Anna Dayton ’26

Sam Detwiler ’23

James Dormer ’24

Amos Elwell ’25

Underprivileged Children’s Education Program (UCEP), Kathmandu, Nepal Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, MD (onsite) NOAA, Noise Cascades: Evaluating the Impacts of Anthropogenic Noise, Seattle, WA The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, Baltimore, MD City of Hope, Duarte, CA

Boston University, Social Learning Lab, Boston, MA Willig, Williams, and Davidson, Philadelphia, PA Maryland State Archives, Maryland 400 Project, Annapolis, MD NOAA, Noise Cascades: Evaluating the Impacts of Anthropogenic Noise, Seattle, WA Touchstone Gallery, Washington, DC

Maryland State Archives, Office of Appraisal & Description, Annapolis, MD Kay Lab, Institute for Mind & Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office for Maryland, Annapolis, MD OHSU’s University Center of Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, Portland, OR 1

Alex Fodor ’23

Hannah Fodor ’24

Georgia Galardi-Pittard ’25

Niovi Gennadiou ’25

Noah Hale ’23

Louise Harden ’26

Nelli Harutyunyan ’24

Zeinep Ibragim Kyzy ’24

Songeun Jang ’24

Anastasios Katakos ’25

Gelila Kebede ’25

Sybil Kushnir ’24

Madelyn Minor ’24

El’ad Nichols-Kaufman ’25

Alexander Paden ‘25

Millie Ransohoff ’26

Lainey Rendelman ’26

Antonina Schlussman ’24

Awarehouse Productions, College Park, MD AlNour Marrakech, Marrakech, Morocco Julia Cooper A20 with NBCUniversal, Los Angeles, CA Athens Epidaurus Festival, Athens, Greece Santa Fe Reporter, Santa Fe, NM Sid the Cat Productions, Los Angeles, CA Edu Network, Yerevan, Armenia Akyltai, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Social Learning Lab, Boston University, Boston, MA Inno-Ian-d E.P.E., Athens, Greece Mother and Child Rehabilitation Centre, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Maryland Office of the Public Defender, Parental Defense Division, Baltimore, MD International Rescue Committee (IRC), Charlottesville, VA City of Annapolis, Dept. of Planning & Zoning, Annapolis, MD Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office for Maryland, Annapolis, MD Rehab 2 Perform (R2P), Annapolis, MD The Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, Jacksonville, FL Touchstones Discussion Project, Stevensville, MD

Bennett Scott ’24

Ali Shawamreh ’26

Lirian Spolaore ’23

Christine Kng (SF13) with DNV Netherlands Energy Systems, The Hague, Netherlands Appalachian Progress Fellowship, Representative Caleb Rudow, District 116, North Carolina House of Representatives, Raleigh, NC SuzeMuze Studio, Annapolis, MD

Overview of the 2023 Hodson Internship Awards *Hosted by an SJC alumnus/a

Abhigya Adhikari ’26, Underprivileged Children’s Education Program (UCEP),

Kathmandu, Nepal Interact directly with children in the Juvenile Correction Home. Plan projects to enrich the learning of the children and to ensure their voices are heard; write and present reports of interactions with children and elevate issues with concerned bodies of the organization.

Rylee Bain ’25, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, MD

Work with the editor of the Maryland Manual On-Line & Director of Government Information Services. Research and write descriptions of the origin and functions of Maryland county government agencies.

Geffen Bendavid ’25, NOAA, Noise Cascades: Evaluating the Impacts of Anthropogenic Noise, Seattle, WA Extract estimates from literature and aid in meta-analysis modeling; focus on the major species within a previously developed ecosystem model; develop teaching tools relevant to the project and to personal career goals.

Peter Boersema ’24, The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, Baltimore, MD Increase knowledge of political and economic ideas by observing the way in which policy professionals use those ideas to make decisions and recommendations. Research a working paper on a suggested topic; develop social media content; research and write memos on current events. *Caleb Briggs ’25, City of Hope, Duarte, CA

Work in the T-Cell Therapeutics Research Laboratories on experiments designed to study immunotherapy in the treatment of cancer. Technically assist in a project aimed at understanding how natural killer cells are suppressed in a patient with acute lymphoblastic leukemia; learn basic molecular and biology laboratory skills including human cell culture, qPCR, mouse tissue isolation and processing, isolation of mononuclear cells from peripheral blood of healthy donors and patients.

Carolynn Ceci ’24, Social Learning Lab, Boston University, Boston, MA Organize and process data from ongoing studies looking at curiosity and learning; provide data coding for ongoing project looking at language around curiosity and metacognition. Valerie Cohen ’26, Willig, Williams, and Davidson, Philadelphia, PA

Assist in servicing the firm’s public safety client group (comprised mostly of unions representing police officers, firefighters, paramedics and correctional officers) in preparation for and participation in contract negotiations and arbitration proceedings; perform research and drafting related to preparation of training materials; explore the emerging utilization of artificial intelligence technology.

Marshall Cooperman ’24, Maryland State Archives, Maryland 400 Project,

Annapolis, MD Work as the Collections Management intern digitizing the series of records known as the Rainbow Books and post them online—these volumes contain over 7,800 documents, a substantial portion of the Archives’ colonial and Revolutionary-era records—and are a key component of the Archives’ commemorations of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution; add item-level entries for a large portion of these documents.

Joseph Cunningham ’23, NOAA, Noise Cascades: Evaluating the Impacts of Anthropogenic Noise, Seattle, WA Read primary literature on how noise affects marine organisms, extracting effect sizes from this literature—what is the magnitude and direction of these effects—for inclusion into a meta-analysis; will focus on the major species within a previously developed ecosystem model; work on course content designed to teach future students about the impact of noise pollution. Emma Cunningham-Bradshaw ’25, Touchstone Gallery, Washington, DC

Research and write about exhibits and projects; communicate with artists, coordinate and plan events; create social media content; learn a variety of video editing techniques; update website; confer with Paris-based photographer.

Anna Dayton ’26, Maryland State Archives, Office of Appraisal & Description, Annapolis, MD Improve the description and/or storage conditions of archive collections; tasks will include researching, describing, inventorying, alphabetizing, flattening, and re-containerization.

*Sam Detwiler ’23, Kay Lab, Institute for Mind & Biology, University of Chicago,

Chicago, IL Receive training from a graduate student, lab tech, and professor; assist with setting up equipment, experiments, training rats, and surgical procedures; participate in laboratory meetings.

James Dormer ’24, Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office for Maryland, Annapolis, MD Train on the database PbK (Prosecutor by Karpel); review older files: identify and categorize reports, charging documents, motions and court orders in time order and eliminate duplicates; work with the Closing Team to check and destroy cases; attend Court Proceedings in both Circuit and District Courts. Amos Elwell ’25, OHSU’s University Center of Excellence in Developmental

Disabilities, Portland, OR Improve access to developmental services for children with autism; gain experience with qualitative data coding, interviewing families and providers, conducting literature reviews, data collection from large repositories, and understanding public health research.

*Alex Fodor ’23, Awarehouse Productions, College Park, MD Act as a production assistant on set; assist with research, conduct interviews and complete administrative duties; learn about video editing and help with post-production. Hannah Fodor ’24, AlNour Marrakech, Marrakech, Morocco Teach English to women with special needs, training them in computer skills; learn about the operation of a charitable association and the needs of adult women with physical disabilities including being deaf and mute; gain basic skills in fundraising for NGOs. *Georgia Galardi-Pittard ’25, Julia Cooper A20 with NBCUniversal, Los Angeles, CA Provide feedback on scripts; observe and offer advice on creative projects; organize equipment; research and edit creative; receive script-writing advice on independent writing projects.

Niovi Gennadiou ’25, Athens Epidaurus Festival, Athens, Greece

Work with communications and production contacting interested guests and audiences; facilitate invitations to journalists, guests, and audiences; handle complaints, questions, and provide assistance; coordinate and communicate with other departments during shows and performances.

Noah Hale ’23, Santa Fe Reporter, Santa Fe, NM Assist with the culture calendar—events in art, film, food, and music, for an alternative weekly paper; work in Adobe InDesign; write weekly web stories including reports and criticism; contribute to weekly Picks page; provide social media updates; and assist with the annual Best of Santa Fe issue. Louise Harden ’26, Sid the Cat Productions, Los Angeles, CA

As a member of the street team, assist in on-the-ground marketing—street art, poster circulation, trading card, and matchbook distribution and potentially assist in the creation and design of these materials; assist in production and show support including stage construction and gear assembly; assist with door management, merchandise sales, and artist accommodation; attend shows and virtual meetings.

Nelli Harutyunyan ’24, Edu Network, Yerevan, Armenia Consult with students about their choice of universities; research partnering universities; promote international programs among the students; organize trainings and social media sessions; interact with customers and gain feedback to improve the organization’s services. Zeinep Ibragim Kyzy ’24, Akyltai, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Explore visual arts and editing at children’s magazine; work on layout design, text editing, illustration, communications; draw and design promotional art for the social media team; attend promotional events and fundraisers; review submitted visual and textual works; maintain communication with schools where the magazine is distributed.

Songeun Jang ’24, Social Learning Lab, Boston University, Boston, MA

Assist with data collection and transcription for current on-going studies in children’s learning; recruit participants at Boston’s Museum of Science and the Boston Commons.

Anastasios Katakos ’25, Inno-Ian-d E.P.E., Athens, Greece

Research European legislation and policy with a particular focus on EU funding policy; summarize policy, translating it and presenting it to clients; create simple, effective presentations; evolve as a public speaker and communicator.

Gelila Kebede ’25, Mother and Child Rehabilitation Centre, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Teach children various subjects and look after them in their break periods; attend staff meetings and provide feedback about the different grade syllabi; propose amendments to different grade’s curriculums gaining an understanding of what works best with the children’s academics; become an advocate for the children’s needs.

Sybil Kushnir ’24, Maryland Office of the Public Defender, Parental Defense Division,

Baltimore, MD Work on discovery requests to DSS; review and communicate with clients regarding CINA cases; attend Zoom court hearings; attend monthly team meetings in PDD office; help clients gather letters documenting parenting classes, therapy, and substance abuse treatment; and ensure clients have Zoom links for court.

Madelyn Minor ’24, International Rescue Committee (IRC), Charlottesville, VA

Work directly with the immigration team assisting IRC clients in preparing applications for adjustment of status to permanent residence, naturalization petitions, family reunification applications, travel documents, renewal and replacement applications.

El’ad Nichols-Kaufman ’25, City of Annapolis, Dept. of Planning & Zoning, Annapolis, MD Gain valuable experience in various aspects of city planning while assisting the City of Annapolis with relevant projects that advance its comprehensive planning goals; will be tailored to meet the intern's interests in exploring various social, environmental, and economic issues pertinent to Annapolis. 6

Alexander Paden ’25, Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office for Maryland, Annapolis, MD Receive database training, read police reports and charging documents; learn office and court procedures for the type of cases that will be assigned; observe cases in Circuit and District Courts; gain hands-on experience with criminal cases and decision-making based on policies and facts of the case. Millie Ransohoff ’26, Rehab 2 Perform (R2P), Annapolis, MD Observe and assist physical therapists in an outpatient orthopedic physical therapy office; observe initial evaluations and follow-up sessions for a variety of patient diagnoses; assist with set-up and clean-up of equipment; engage PTs with questions regarding daily interactions with patients. Lainey Rendelman ’26, The Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, Jacksonville, FL Cut team highlights during games and post via the team’s social media accounts; serve as the team’s broadcast producer on their flagship radio station; contribute to the Jumbo Shrimp Network with interviews, reports, and player storylines and community efforts in Northeast Florida; assist with all media relations efforts, including accommodating interview requests, administering media credentials, creating & distributing gameday materials and various graphic and web design projects; help oversee the Jumbo Shrimp press box. *Antonina Schlussman ’24, Touchstones Discussion Project, Stevensville, MD

Research topics related to educational development for grades K-12; coordinate Touchstones programs with a range of groups—from foster youth and parents to elementary and middle school children; explore educational settings that advance equity and inclusion by cultivating trust and community; learn essential business and client management tools and approaches.

*Bennett Scott ’24, Christine Kng (SF13) with DNV Netherlands Energy Systems,

The Hague, Netherlands As a research assistant, read articles, collect and analyze data, develop core research skills such as R, financial modeling, and Excel analysis for projects that will culminate in a number of papers and presentations for publication or conferences; receive professional development within the infrastructure and energy space.

Ali Shawamreh ’26, Appalachian Progress Fellowship, Representative Caleb Rudow, District 116, North Carolina House of Representatives, Raleigh, NC Conduct research on policy issues and present findings; draft memos, reports, and other documents related to legislation and other matters of interest; assist with constituent communications and outreach efforts to community organizations and other advocacy groups. *Lirian Spolaore ’23, SuzeMuze Studio, Annapolis, MD Participate in website development interfacing with the user experience, advancing the site visibility and expanding user experience and service product access; strategize new site and project goals and objectives; provide IT support for the Social Media platform project promotion and news.

Abhigya Adhikari ‘26

Underprivileged Children’s Education Program (UCEP) Kathmandu, Nepal My first experience in a professional environment after becoming a Johnnie was particularly interesting this summer. In the course of my Hodson internship, I had a lot of conceptual concerns with the nature and impact of the organization’s work with children. More specifically, the notions of justice and the good and whether I can insert myself in an environment with individuals who had done things that are wrong with regard to my idea of the good. All in all, I got the kind of exposure and opportunities that no one else could. My time at the Child Correction Home (managed by UCEP, Nepal) allowed me to interact with the residents of the Home in a manner that no other person could, and this was all thanks to the provision made for me by UCEP to be able to enter the premises between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm, running awareness programs and writing workshops for the residents. UCEP also asked me to do outreach for them during the internship, which meant I also got to meet with and talk to multiple other organizations and individuals working with marginalized children and child education about the nature of my work, my education at St. John’s and exploring the possibility of a future collaboration with UCEP for the residents of the Child Correction Home. The primary responsibilities for me were to survey the experience of the residents in a subjective and candid manner and flag anything concerning that may come about during the events or conversations with the residents. Along with this, I was given the opportunity to organize events to encourage creativity and develop soft skills in the residents. This was paired with me acting as a substitute teacher for English for Grades 5 to 7 on the days that I was working, as the residents would be in class and this would allow me to interact with the residents even more. While the internship experience was rewarding, I did find myself at odds with some of my colleagues as they did not seem to be as passionate about the residents as I was. This might be a result of the bureaucratic nature of their work and because most of them were employed by the Government of Nepal and assigned to the Home instead of having picked to work there. Even in that, my supervisor guided me through the process of working in such a system and navigating through such experiences. My supervisor was a big highlight of my internship as not only did he guide me in working with other colleagues but taught me a lot about other experiences he has had as a lawyer working in Nepal for over twenty years. With him, I got to learn about the obstacles in the field of child rights and education. Teaching the residents during school hours was the most interesting for the Johnnie in me as that classroom was unconventional but not in the St. John’s contrarian way but more because there were students ranging from 11 years of age to nearly 18 years of age in grade 5 and that range of their ages made it difficult to teach all of them at a uniform pace. This meant I had to quickly adapt my perception of an ideal education and change my style in a manner that would be good for all the students. I moved to an approach where I would go over something to the larger group and the ones that had a relatively firmer grasp on the topic would then be tutors to their peers for the rest of the 8

class to make sure that everyone in the class would be on the same page about the curriculum. Moreover, this made me able to see and analyze for my report the dynamic between the residents in a different setting which helped me get a clearer idea of the camaraderie between them. Some students stood out to me as excellent communicators and quick learners and that meant that I would take their names for consideration as tutors for other students. Some students showed concerning behavior or the content of their writing in the workshop was concerning, in that case it would be flagged by me or my peers working with me for the workshops and brought to the administration’s attention. A few of the cases were some that needed immediate attention, usually pertaining to family problems or other problems and that would mean that it could be addressed by the appropriate channel quicker. I feel like the idea of me acting like a bridge and flagging or recommending residents put me in an atypical position of authority. However, as I write this, after my internship ended, a resident passed away due to a gap in communication between the residents and the administration due to a delayed medical treatment which was a concern I brought up in my final report to the organization and the stakeholders. This, if anything, furthers my interest in this field and working in the Child Rights Sector, to help reduce situations in which there is no one talking to the residents at facilities like these, which means an array of crucial circumstances are overlooked.

Rylee Bain ‘25

Maryland State Archives Annapolis, MD This summer I had the opportunity to intern for the Maryland Manual at the Maryland State Archives. As a non-native to Maryland, I had very minimal exposure to the Manual prior to this experience. I have since learned that the Maryland Manual provides historical and current information about government in Maryland. I have greatly appreciated this internship for not only teaching me about the wonderful things that are under the purview of the State Archives, but also for making me feel a greater connection to the state of Maryland. My primary responsibilities on the team focused on describing county government. Each county has an executive branch, a judicial branch with a variety of courts, and a legislative branch with either a County Council or a Board of County Commissioners. My first assignment was to perform general housekeeping for these pages relating to each county’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches. I found updated contact information for County Commissioners, Councilmembers, and Sheriff’s Office leaders, I corrected the lists of boards and commissions for each county, and also added information on county-sponsored programs. My second project was focused on finding recent reports from County agencies, and after that I transitioned to updating the biographies of current County Commissioners and Councilmembers. My final project was slightly different than my previous ones. For each county, the Manual has two different sites, one called the Organizational structure which primarily contains contact information, and one called the Origin and Functions page. This new project was focused on the Origin and Functions page for each county. By using the Archive Library, I would read various histories of each county and try to identify the origins of county agencies and important buildings like courthouses and hospitals. My experience at St. John’s really sparked my interest in the State Archives. Through my time on the Delegate Council I was able to explore various archives of the college and found a passion for immersing myself in the history of the institutions that I am a member of. For the majority of my internship, I wasn’t able to use the technical skills that I had developed at St. John’s, but once I started my final project, I began to employ my critical reading skills that St. John’s has fostered in me. I learned a lot throughout this internship, but not in the way I thought I would. The work wasn’t exactly what I was expecting it to be. I wasn’t working directly with any actual archives and I spent most of my time proofreading website pages. I learned that this kind of work, while valuable and important, isn’t the kind of work that sparks joy for me. The people at the State Archives were wonderfully kind and dedicated to their work, and I will continue to seek opportunities that bring me that kind of passion. I am grateful for the ten weeks I was able to spend at the State Archives and am thankful to Diane Evartt and James Bigwood on the Manual team, Emily Oland Squires for overseeing this program, everyone at the Archives for being welcoming and encouraging throughout this experience, and the Hodson Internship Program for fostering this opportunity. 10

Geffen Bendavid ‘25

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Fisheries Seattle, Washington The internship I was privileged to work at was with Dylan Gomes, a researcher with NOAA. Over the course of the internship, I assisted with Dylan’s research, which was a meta-analysis of the effects of anthropogenic noise on fish, the overall purpose of which was examining prior research on the effects of man-made noise from vessels on specific animals, and analyzing the results of the data, so as to be able to have a more holistic view of the effects, with the end goal being to use the results of the research in ecosystem models. My work in many ways felt similar to my time at St. John’s. A major part of what I had to do was simply read over a text, and analyze it, which is something that St. John’s has given me ample practice with. There was also a benefit to the work I had done at St. John’s which I wouldn’t have expected, which was letting me move between different types of text quickly. Despite what one would hope, lab reports often have wildly varying styles, both in terms of writing, and how they present results, which can make it difficult to repeatedly jump to new ones, but the experience St. John’s has given me, of having to read several widely differing texts over the span of a few weeks, and then analyze them to such an extent that I can discuss them with my peers helped with that difficulty. Overall, the biggest, and, for the most part, only, point of contention I had with my internship was that it was virtual. Though virtual work is certainly not inherently a negative, having a virtual experience with something that was also a first experience with it can make it very difficult to get a feel for what the experience might be like in a more routine environment, particularly for a field like marine biology, wherein a career would most likely involve field work at some point. Likewise, the virtual nature made it hard to develop a connection with my coworkers and mentor, which is quite unfortunate, considering that the times I was able to meet with them were always quite positive. That said, those are both certainly problems that I can take effort to ameliorate, if not fix, on my end, and it has certainly given me ideas for how I would approach another virtual opportunity. The most notable of those would be that I would certainly want to check in regularly with my mentor. This, I believe, would go a long way towards building a connection with my mentor, as well as improving discipline, and adding a sense of structure to the experience, which a virtual setting can easily lose. Overall, the experience was certainly positive, but it does not feel as though it necessarily affected my career goals all that much. I pursued the internship because I was interested in marine biology, and I remain interested in marine biology, so it remains a possible career path I would be interested in, but certainly not the only one. It did, however, make me certain that I would like to avoid virtual work if possible. That said, I did come out of the internship feeling very well towards NOAA, I thought my mentor was very good, and I would feel quite lucky if I were ever given the opportunity to work there again.

Peter Boersema ‘24

Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD I was a research assistant to Prof. Steve Hanke at the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins Univ. in Baltimore, Maryland. My co-workers and I assisted Prof. Hanke in both his research and public engagement programs. In particular, my two main roles were (1) drafting tweets for Prof. Hanke’s twitter account and (2) writing a research paper on the economic history of British Guiana in the early 20th century. The subject of my research paper, which was written under the guidance of Dr. Kurt Schuler, a frequent associate of Steve Hanke and an alumnus of St. John’s College, is the Board of Commissioners of Currency, a currency board which existed in British Guiana between 1917 and 1951. A currency board is an alternative arrangement to a central bank in which the board’s currency is fully backed by a reserve currency (in this case, the Pound Sterling). Holders of the board’s currency may convert it freely into the reserve currency. The board’s currency thereby becomes a clone of the reserve currency. My paper compiled a history of British Guiana’s currency board using both primary and secondary sources and analyzed the functions of the board using balance sheets published by the currency board during its 34-year existence. I was very happy for the opportunity to write this paper because I gained experience writing and researching in a way that is not directly taught at St. John’s. Steve Hanke maintains a very active presence on twitter. He uses it as one of the main ways to spread his research and analysis of current events. He has 661K followers and claims to be the third most-followed economist on twitter, after Paul Krugman and Nate Silver. My job was to draft 3-4 tweets per day on current events, adding pithy analysis based on Prof. Hanke’s economic views, which are generally Austrian and monetarist. I enjoyed having to keep up with the news, both domestically and in countries I had never paid much attention to before. I also think I developed a better sense of which news stories are significant and which aren’t. On the other hand, as somebody who lacks strong political opinions but would prefer to inquire freely into the political good, having to draft commentary using Prof. Hanke’s personal perspective felt a bit mercenary and unsatisfying. I also performed various other tasks which included reading and summarizing published economics research on the subject of sanctions. My internship ended up being hybrid, so I commuted up to Baltimore ~2 days a week and worked from Annapolis the rest of the time. My coworkers were Johns Hopkins undergraduates, many of whom were working fully remotely. Because of this lack of face-to-face time, there was not much camaraderie. I’ve learned from this that, at least early in my career, I would prefer a job where my coworkers and I work primarily in person. I took this internship because I was interested in going to graduate school in economics, and I wanted to get a sense for what academic economics is like. This summer, through the things I read and the people I met, I became aware of a wider variety of potential career paths. Economics graduate school is still on my radar, but I’m also considering economics-adjacent careers. 12

Caleb Briggs ‘25

City of Hope Cancer Research Hospital Duarte, CA Hosted by alumnus Dr. Steve Forman (A70) My Summer as a Lab Rat This summer, I worked in a lab investigating a possible new avenue in immunotherapy for combating cancer. B-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (B-ALL) is among the most common pediatric cancers and is highly treatable with about 90% of cases seeing full remission. But in the case of adults, that number falls off to about 30% of cases. The lab I’m working in has found, previously, that a specific immune cell, the natural killer (NK) cell, can be used to predict the outcomes for patients. In patients with good outcomes, NK cell numbers are generally elevated, and the NK cells are functioning properly. However, in patients with poor outcomes, those NK cell numbers are even higher but are not functioning properly. This led the researchers in my lab to ask the question: how can we help these NK cells to function properly and maybe chip away at the poor survivability of B-ALL in adults? My project to begin to answer this question, was to help find out if type I interferons (a protein that are expressed by infected and cancerous cells), which had been shown to improve NK cell function in B-ALL, do so through direct or indirect means. I helped do this by using lab mice that were genetically modified to develop B-ALL, assisting with injections, and then dissections and processing of different tissues. The dissections of the mice were quite extraordinary and made me recall freshman lab. To harvest the blood of a mouse, the veins can’t be used; they’re too small. Instead, you must do a direct puncture of the heart and for this to work the heart still needs to be beating. The mouse had been euthanized with CO2 prior to this and wasn’t breathing or conscious when this was performed. It was quite incredible to open a mouse’s chest cavity and reveal a heart that pumped blood, for up to five minutes after death. One researcher even demonstrated that a heart could be removed and would continue to beat on the table of its own accord, giving me a real-life glimpse of exactly what Vesalius and Harvey wrote about centuries ago. This was all done in conjunction with the Roberts Summer Academy, which I had the privilege of being a part of. The Academy acts as a supplement to the lab work and is a series of lectures and discussions on a myriad of topics from the Central Dogma of biology to AI helping us write papers. The Academy consisted of a seminar (not quite like ours) and discussion on the work of a particular researcher, led by that researcher, a research ethics course that was largely studentled, student presentations of the projects they were working on, and a biology lecture. The biology lectures were by far the most challenging classes because they demanded a technical understanding of a different topic each week and then the application of that understanding to a current scientific paper. Most classes encouraged participation and so the skills I’d acquired from all classes at St. John’s were very helpful.

The Academy, combined with my lab, gave me both a cohort of similar-aged students (including two Johnnies of Santa Fe fame) and a strong group of mentors. In both settings, I found a lot of support and a real commitment to helping me understand the theory behind what we were doing as well as the actual skills needed to do it. There was no question too big or small that I could ask in class or in the lab. Both my main mentor and my bench mentor (the one with whom I spent most of my time), were impressed not with my textbook knowledge of science (which is slim) but with my ability to reason and think like a scientist. For this, I credit my last two years at St. John’s. Before a liberal arts education, I had discounted math and science as subjects I was hopeless at. But at St. John’s I’ve learned how to read a text and ask the right questions to have a better grasp on a concept. I’m still not winning any math competitions anytime soon but now feel that I have the tools to tackle any problem I’m faced with. Thanks to both St. John’s and this program, I now feel comfortable trying to digest scientific papers. It takes me longer to do so than a real researcher and I probably don’t glean as much as they do, but I’m better off for not being afraid of a challenge. Despite the support given to me, that’s not to say all was well in the lab. My mentor had become stressed by deadlines and results and had translated that to the members of my lab. As a result, when I came, we lost a postdoc and then a month later we lost our PhD student. Both went on to other labs/jobs in search of a less stressful environment. This has left one postdoc (my bench mentor) and our lab technician, both of whom don’t really want to stay. I’ve been largely isolated from this attrition, but the negativity still lingers. Despite this, I personally felt very welcome and enjoyed my time in the lab. I have been offered a position in the lab in case I decide to take a gap year before medical school. While I don’t think I plan on returning, it’s great to have the offer. The reason I don’t plan on returning isn’t so much due to the pressures exerted by my mentor, but more so due to my desire to work in a more clinical setting. While I think that after this internship I could do well as a career researcher, my interest in being a doctor who works directly with patients hasn’t diminished. This internship has also convinced me that I should finish my liberal arts education. While a hard math and science background can be very helpful in research and medicine, the intellectual maturity that comes from a liberal education is also incredibly helpful. It helped me analyze procedures and ask questions that most students would not. Many researchers can often get bogged down in the minutia of the question they’re trying to answer and lose sight of the big picture. Having a well-rounded thought process has helped me advance and stand out in an otherwise crowded field.

Carolynn Ceci ‘24

Social Learning Lab (SLL) Boston University Boston, MA This summer I worked as an intern at the SLL of Boston University. My main responsibilities involved data “coding,” which I did in Excel, sorting out “curiosity utterances” and the proceeding five responses from a transcription of an anonymous family’s dinner table conversation. This required me to be painstakingly careful with every single line, as even a small error could skew the organization of the whole spreadsheet. I also entered participants of curiosity study’s results into another spreadsheet that gave a frame of reference as to the background of the subjects. Weekly I attended an all-lab meeting, in which we discussed papers on new advancements in scientific academia, such as AI. All members of the meeting, including interns, were invited to participate in the discussion, and the atmosphere was very much like a St. John’s seminar. In these all-lab meetings there were a lot of doctoral students, scholars, and researchers, who I had unique opportunities to talk to. As a Johnnie I felt that I was able to maximize what I got out of the interactions, having learned how to ask productive questions. Because of this opportunity, I am certain that I would like a career in child psychology, and I also would like to try working in a more “hands on” style to see how it compares to research. I found my fellow interns, the lab managers, and doctoral students to all be friendly and supportive, as well as very excited about what they did. I particularly appreciated observing the passion they had. While I enjoyed the people, I didn’t particularly like working in a room with no windows. I preferred it when we went out to the park to recruit subjects. However, even the bleakness of the lab provided me with an opportunity to exercise creativity. The lab manager and I worked on ways to create a more comfortable and aesthetic workspace by bringing in softer lights, and adding earthy and natural tones with decorative plants, wallpaper, and place mats. I hope that the people I have met and the connections I have made with the members of the SLL will serve me well, and perhaps I could return to work for them, even as soon as next summer.

Valerie Cohen ‘26

Willig, Williams & Davidson Philadelphia, PA This summer I was able to have an internship at Willig, Williams & Davidson, a law firm in downtown Philadelphia. During my time as an intern at the firm, I got to research various subjects that mainly pertained to police officers. My first topic, marijuana, was split into two sections. My first section was on my very first day on the job, my mentor Rick sent me information on marijuana that was generated by ChatGPT. ChatGPT is becoming a tool used more regularly in everyday life. From what Rick gave me, I created a PowerPoint with information entirely from ChatGPT, which Rick later put into his own PowerPoint he presented at a conference. The second section of my topic on marijuana was to research marijuana in the police force, whether it be the officers wanting to use marijuana or officers detecting marijuana when they pull someone over or recent bills that might have been passed concerning the legalization of marijuana. Looking through this research, I came across a lot of interesting things. Some interesting articles I read were about how some agencies are having a different approach to applicants and their past marijuana use when they apply for jobs, and how volunteers in Maryland are voluntarily getting stoned for the benefit of officers to understand the effect of marijuana on a person. These articles intrigued me because without this internship, I would have never investigated this topic as much as I did. Having a St. John’s background in reading helped me get through the articles and made me look at them in a different way. I asked myself questions as I read and tried to figure them out. The use of artificial intelligence was the next topic Rick had me investigate. Like marijuana, AI is getting better and used more often by people. My main focus on AI was the use of it with police officers and their body cameras. What I found had a lot to do with police departments using an algorithm that could identify over 5 million different phrases and have it go through the officer’s body cam footage and identify certain phrases that might be concerning and would categorize them for possible later review. My AI research not only covered police officers but also the use of AI in general. Over the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone worked from home. Companies used several ways to manage their employees to ensure that they worked with some of those being where they looked at their computer camera, analyzing their keystrokes or even where they looked on their screen. There are concerns about the use of artificial intelligence. For police officers it might not seem like a huge deal compared to companies watching employees, but it is somewhat of an invasion of privacy. Through this internship, I was able to connect, through my mentor, with a couple of the other lawyers. One of the lawyers I was able to meet had me work on one of my last topics for the summer. This lawyer needed a draft of a pregnancy policy that he would later be able to give to police departments if a female police officer were to get pregnant. Throughout the next few weeks, I connected with the lawyer a couple of times to make sure I was on the right track. He gave me some pointers which helped. Being able to work on this policy was one of the more time-consuming projects I worked on this summer, but the most rewarding because being able to write the draft helped me see other work that was not all research type work. 16

I was also fortunate to connect with a different lawyer at the firm. This lawyer let me attend one of his arbitrations that had to do with whether an employee’s termination was justified. I did not get to see much with that arbitration because it got settled so fast. After the arbitration was settled, he took me aside to explain exactly what happened. Even though I did not get to see the arbitration, I did get to see a client that decided to take the payment offered. While it would have been great to see an arbitration that did not get settled right away, it was still beneficial for me to see that kind of work being done. Most of the work I did throughout the summer involved a lot of reading. Being at St. John’s and having to read all the time and interpret what is being said helped me throughout the internship. Most of my internship was reading articles and interpreting them. Just like reading at St. John’s, I would have to go back and reread to fully understand what might be happening. After going through an entire summer of a law internship, it has not changed my goal for after St. John’s. The type of law I experienced is still appealing to me and will hopefully continue to be appealing to me. I am not entirely set on what law I want to pursue; this internship has given me a glimpse of one type that I could see myself getting into. I would like to experience other types of law or take classes so I can decide what I want to do in graduate school. Since COVID-19 happened, not many people return to the office anymore. I saw this with Rick. If he did not need to go in, why waste the 30 to 45 minute car ride to get there when you could be working? I went downtown several times. Twice with Rick and once by myself to see the arbitration. On the first trip downtown, I was introduced to people in the office that Rick worked with. The downside was that there were some people that were not there that Rick wanted me to meet. While I liked going downtown and seeing people in the office and having physical interactions with people, sometimes it was easier just to stay at home and get that extra 45 minutes of work done rather than driving downtown. My mentality right now is that going into the office every day is not always necessary, but maybe going in a couple times a week would not hurt. If I decide to choose this path of being a lawyer, in five or six years hopefully, working from home might be in the past, I have no idea, but having the option to not have to go in everyday somewhat appeals to me. Being able to work at Willig, Williams & Davidson was amazing. It is an all-female owned law firm, which was great on its own, but being able to connect with lawyers and have me help them was even better. I was lucky enough that Rick let me do this internship even though they do not have specifically designed internships for college students. He gave me a glimpse of what a lawyer for the police and firefighter unions is like and what they do. Even though I do not know what type of law I would like to end up doing, if I were to become a lawyer for police and firefighter unions, it would be an honor to work at Willig, Williams & Davidson. I got to do such amazing work there that still makes me want to be a lawyer. Overall, I loved my summer internship and am so grateful I got the opportunity to do it.

Marshall Cooperman ‘24 Maryland State Archives Annapolis, MD

This summer, I was an intern in the research department at the Maryland State Archives. My main task was to help catalog a series of documents called the Rainbow Books. These are large, color-coded volumes containing the correspondence of Maryland’s executive branch from the 1760s through the 1810s. The majority of the documents are from the Revolutionary War era. Taken together, they represent an incredible source for any researcher seeking to understand Maryland during the Revolution and the Early Republic period. I added a short description for each item in the books. All the Rainbow Books are in the process of being scanned, and when they are complete the images will be linked to my item-level descriptions in the Guide to Government Records. Along with my fellow intern, we were able to catalog some 34 books and more than 3,000 individual items. In addition, I did individual research on political violence in Maryland during the Revolutionary War, which has since been published on the Archives’ blog. There were some significant challenges that had to be overcome along the way. The first is that the collection is very poorly organized. It has been cataloged multiple times, and none of these attempts have made the structure of the collection any more logical. But by simply working through the collection it became easier to follow them, if not to understand the reasoning behind the previous methods of organization. A more substantial and enduring difficulty was reading the documents, the vast majority of which are written in eighteenth-century cursive. Though a few of the letters were clearly written by professional clerks, who had excellent handwriting, the rest ranged from the difficult to read to almost illegible. Ironically, the letters written in the best hand were all in French, which I do not know. A substantial amount of my time had to be spent trying to parse out what exactly the authors had written. Another major challenge was how to condense letters, which could be as long as seven or eight pages, into a few sentence description. A lot of thought had to go into what should be included or left out in the description of every document. Besides cataloging, my other main task was to do individual research on something that I found interesting in the documents. I focused at first on the case of James Bosely and Vincent Trapnall. Bosely was a militia captain in Baltimore County who was appointed as collector of fines and Trapnall was a Loyalist who refused to pay the fine for non-enrollment in the militia. When Bosely attempted to collect the fine, Trapnell beat him up with a large stick. From my research into this case, I became aware of a broader pattern of political violence in Baltimore, committed both by Loyalists and by Patriots. The Whig Club, a Patriot vigilante organization in Baltimore, engaged in a campaign of extralegal threats and terror that grew so egregious that the pro-Independence state government was forced to suppress the club. Before my research, I had no inkling of the degree of internal strife in Maryland during the Revolution, nor of the class, racial, religious, and even personal tensions which suffused and often exacerbated it. 18

In addition to my work on the Rainbow Books and on my individual research, I also shadowed on the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland Project. I worked through a collection of thousands of pages of governor’s correspondence from 1906-1907 and 1898, looking for any papers related to two lynchings. The first, of Henry Davis, a seventeen year-old, murdered in December 1906 by a mob for allegedly assaulting a white woman. The second, the lynching Garfield King, an eighteen-year-old, killed by a mob after shooting and wounding a white man. Unfortunately, I was not able to find any documents related to the Davis case though I did find several letters between the Governor’s office and the Pinkerton Detective agency regarding the investigation of the King Case. From these two collections as a whole, I was able to learn a lot about Maryland at the turn of the century. In both this project and the Rainbow Books collection, I was reading through the governor’s correspondence. It was a surprise to read letters written in 1907 to the governor about a lot of the same things as letters written in 1787. The main difference was that most of the responses from the governor in 1907 directed the writer to the appropriate administrative office, whereas in 1787, there was no office to direct them to. It was fascinating to see the development and formalization of the institutions of government, which judging by the letters seemed to have happened without the average citizen registering it. In my time at the Archives, I have greatly expanded my historical research and writing skills, learned how to use archival search and cataloging systems, and had the opportunity to see how an active research archive works. Learning how to write a scholarly article was especially helpful, it is a skill that I would not have been able to build without this internship. I know that the skills that I have gained here will serve me in good stead in my future career. But most importantly, I have come away from this internship totally convinced that I want to be a historian. I am very grateful to the Hodson Trust for giving me this opportunity.

Joseph Cunningham ‘23

NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration), Seattle, WA In my internship with NOAA I was conducting metaanalysis on studies of how manmade noise influences marine environments. This work had two goals, seeing the overall picture of our understanding of noise and its effects on the marine web of life through data analysis and connecting these findings to educational materials and curriculum that can boost knowledge of this emerging dimension of how we shape our environment, helping students to read scientific literature as a primary source and making data literacy or scientific reading skills a point of focus in science education. The internship began as an interest in new fields of science and scientific outreach that was fostered by my time at St. John’s and previous experiences with Hodson. St. John’s taught me how much people can gain from going to the source and being allowed to draw directly from it. In my internship I was thinking about different routes to bringing new science into education than the traditional textbook approach. The route that I saw through my work on educational resources and teaching approaches in connection to new science in this internship was to do with making teachers and students more like scientists and less like spectators to science. As I was working on the project I was not only expanding my data handling skills and domain knowledge in the area of anthropogenic noise effects, I was also projecting work for future classrooms in which students would take a lead reading and evaluating primary science, and where teaching could become more like the process of ongoing research than an intellectually closed atmosphere of teaching to the test or the textbook. This project encouraged me to seek employment as a teacher, it taught me how we can make live connections to ongoing difficult scientific work. Although I do not see this opening up into employment with NOAA it helped me look for a school that was partnering with other river agencies to produce an environment where citizen science, involving teachers and students, is more bound up with the ongoing realities of school life. I enjoyed the flexible asynchronous nature of my remote workplace. Working with my colleagues meant keeping good documentation, communicating through signposts in a shared territory, just like much international science is done today. Or like the authors we read at St. John’s, whether it is geographic or temporal, what separates us is a measure of what we overcome through conversation. What I found in this role that I would like to have going forward is a blurring of boundaries, between domains. I want to find in life, as I found at St. John’s, is that areas of study can bleed into one, and that academic or intellectual pursuits can find an expression in the active life of work and the other way round, since Leah and Rachel are sisters after all. This is a comforting thing to find since what faces most seniors upon graduation is a choice: work or debt, money or the mind, grad school or getting a job. What we look for in each of those can be found at different times in different places, and increasingly we can’t get what we are looking for in one source. As I was sifting through the webs of often contradictory data this summer and thinking how you would distill the elements of the picture and make them accessible to the average high schooler on their own terms, I was thinking about the difficult, but often rewarding ways multiplicity makes itself necessary. Thank you to the Hodson Internship fund for allowing me to make this exploration. 20

Emma Cunningham-Bradshaw ‘25 Touchstone Gallery Washington, DC

This summer I interned at Touchstone Gallery in Washington, D.C. in a hybrid capacity. I spent the first three weeks of summer going into the gallery and engaging in the day-to-day gallery activities. These included guiding visitors at the gallery, working at evening events, connecting with artists represented by the gallery and conducting several in-person interviews for the Touchstone blog, and participating in exercises to learn about subjects related to art and gallery curation (i.e., on color theory and organization of art pieces for exhibits). I then traveled to France where I worked remotely for seven weeks. I immediately began work largely focused on Touchstone’s virtual presence. I created the online galleries for the June Member Show, the Persian Perspectives exhibit and the Attainable Art Show. This entailed corresponding with artists involved in the exhibition, ensuring information on their pieces was correct, and continuously communicating with my supervisor Abbey McClain for updates on the exhibitions’ curation. In August, I created the virtual guided exhibition for People and the Planet, an international open-call juried exhibition. For this latter exhibition, I learned how to operate Kunstmatrix, a program for creating 3D displays of artworks, and learned photoshop to edit pictures of sculptures. I simultaneously organized meetings with the Touchstone member artists who have connections to France in order to create a series highlighting these artists’ experiences in the country. This series involved writing articles based on the interviews and supplementing the writing with the artists’ own art pieces as well as pictures and videos I took at the locations that inspired them in France. I met and interviewed Rick Braswell, a photographer represented by Touchstone, based in Paris whose focus in photography is street scenes. He has many photographs from Paris streets, and I visited his preferred shooting locations to capture my own photos of the environment. I also interviewed Amy Sabrin and McCain McMurray, both member artists at Touchstone who spent time in France for artist residencies. I visited the sites of inspiration to Amy in the region of Provence where her residency was located, taking photos and videos to illustrate my own experiences in the environment for the series. The finished series on these three artists, titled French Connections, will be up on the Touchstone blog in mid-September. While in France, my French improved immensely due to daily use of the language; this is already benefiting me as a French Assistant at St. John’s. Further, since many of my favorite art movements blossomed in France (New Wave film and Impressionism), I visited many art exhibits and cinemas which expanded my appreciation and familiarity with these movements. These experiences further cemented my goal of working in the art field in France upon graduation. I was also exposed to many more work opportunities in museums, and graduate programs at universities that are of interest to me. Working at Touchstone was my first full-time foray into the art world. I developed relationships with artists both local to the D.C. area and with connections in many countries. I struck a good 21

balance between more administrative work and creative projects. When I was remote, I maintained strong communication with the Touchstone team which was essential for successfully engaging in this internship. Upon returning to the U.S., I went into Touchstone for the last two weeks of the internship, working two events and again engaging in daily activities of the gallery. St. John’s is where I began sincerely exploring the art field. I began using analog film in the Darkroom, started a film club among friends to watch films of the 20th century, led a reading group that included discussion of aesthetics, and worked at the Mitchell Museum. I have met many students and tutors at SJC who have helped me develop my ideas of art and beauty which has in turn fueled my goal of working in film. Links to my internship work: June Member Show online gallery: https://www.touchstonegallery.com/junemember-show Persian Perspectives online gallery: https://www.touchstonegallery.com/persianperspectives-gallery Artist Interview for Persian Perspectives: https://www.touchstonegallery.com/blogall/2023/6/30/an-interview-with-setarehpourrajabi Attainable Art Show online gallery: https://www.touchstonegallery.com/attainableart-gallery People and the Planet virtual exhibition: https://www.touchstonegallery.com/virtualplanet The group photo was taken on the interns' last day at Touchstone, and they are all touching the stone (the stone was a sculpture in the August exhibit).

Anna Dayton ‘26

Maryland State Archives Annapolis, MD After attending an information session with the Maryland State Archives in March, I decided that it would be an interesting experience to work there for the summer. My love of history and fascination with the development of the United States motivated me to apply for what was advertised as a historic research project into the lives of soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War. The job itself was not what I expected, in ways both positive and negative. Upon arriving, I was sent to the appraisal office where I learned that I would be processing Provincial Court Judgements and uploading CDs onto computers. I soon became acquainted with legal processes and personal letters from the 1700s, and with the help of my colleagues, grew in my ability to read old handwriting and care for fragile records. At one point, I found a document that led me down a rabbit hole uncovering some surprising family history. Another document led me to discover a very far reaching and elaborate murder case. My boss was patient and flexible with me, and she was compassionate towards my struggles and individual interests. The environment was laid back, and my coworkers were kind while showing me how to navigate the stacks and decipher illegible documents. Before I began the internship, I had no idea how many roles and functions the State Archives served in protecting and collecting not only historic letters, but also modern personal information. It was a funny experience to alphabetize people’s marriage certificates and consider that I could have passed that person on the street and they would have no idea that I touched their marriage certificate. Although I am very appreciative of the people I worked with, the unique information I learned, and the mission of the State Archives, I am not suited for the lifestyle necessary for archival work. I found it extremely difficult at times to stay focused during the sedentary days indoors at my cubicle desk. I am fascinated by history as much as ever and have grown in knowledge and appreciation for what it takes to manage an archive, but I’m glad to have discovered that a career as an archivist is not for me.

Sam Detwiler ‘23

Kay Lab, Institute for Mind & Biology, University of Chicago Chicago, IL Hosted by alumna Dr. Leslie Kay (SF83) With my Hodson Internship Award, I worked as a lab technician in the Kay Lab at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Mind and Biology under the mentorship of Dr. Leslie Kay. Kay Lab is a well-established neuroscience laboratory focusing on the field of olfaction. Studies and publications from the lab have focused on the role of neural oscillations (colloquially known as brain waves) in the olfactory system of rodents. Dr. Kay herself is an alumnus of St. John’s Santa Fe and is very integrative of the college’s values in the operation, design, and thought of her lab, onboarding at least one student from the college each summer. When I first arrived at the lab, I was met with a crash course in the history of the field. This involved reading the numerous papers published in the 20+ years of the lab's existence as well as conversations with colleagues and contributors to our understanding of olfaction and sensation. Coming from a Johnnie background, I enjoyed the weekly lab meetings which consisted of seminar type discussion surrounding a chosen paper. After this initial familiarization and training in the protocols of working with animals, my roles and responsibilities at the lab became manifold as I was exposed to as many of the daily operations as possible. Going into the internship, I was aware of some of the lab’s experiment procedures but could not have predicted how interesting and engaging the hands-on work of running experiments was. The principal animal I worked with were Long-Evans Rats; these intelligent creatures are trained through ascribing meaning to different odor sets and are surgically implanted with electrodes to measure their oscillations after having reached threshold behavior. I jokingly remark that I can now add “brain surgery” to my resumé. On the analytical side of the lab, I was often learning to code in MATLAB, a coding program and language used extensively in neuroscience. About halfway through the internship, I was offered a permanent position as lab manager at the completion of my internship, as the current manager will be beginning graduate school. As someone who hopes to follow a path in STEM, specifically medicine, having the opportunity to work in such a prestigious lab after an undergraduate degree in the humanities is invaluable. Without the Hodson award, such an opportunity to test whether research was a path of interest would have been difficult if not impossible. I’m extremely grateful to have been granted the award and can now proclaim employment directly out of St. John’s.

James Dormer ‘24

Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office for Maryland, Annapolis, MD This summer I had the pleasure of interning with the Anne Arundel State’s Attorney’s Office. In broad strokes, this meant that I was a part of the support staff that works in the office and ensures that all the behind-the-scenes work goes smoothly so that the attorneys can focus on preparing for their own cases. More specifically, the intern gets to sort through a wide variety of old cases, deciding what must be kept for our records—both paper and digital—and what can be disposed of to clear space for future cases. In my work I was exposed to homicides, armed robberies, assaults, arson, among many types of crime. By spending time with these various files, I became familiar with the sort of work a prosecutor puts into preparing a case, even if it is just a simple guilty plea on a second-degree assault. I also got the opportunity to sit in on court proceedings most days. I got to watch one criminal bench trial, one civil jury trial, and part of a criminal jury trial, as well as many sentencings, hearings, motions, pleas, and three judge panels. This exposed me to a lot of the mechanics of court, which was very illuminating. While most of my time was spent with either juvenile misdemeanors or old adult felonies from over fifteen years ago, I was able to work on two cases that were much larger than others. These were far more complex and thorny, and took nearly a week each to sort through, scan, and organize for our file room. This is where I could tell the most, that the education I’ve received at St. John’s has served me well. I needed to quickly read several thousand pages of documents and comprehend not only what they were saying, but how they fit into the bigger picture of the case as a whole. St. John’s has taught me how to read things with a careful eye, without sacrificing speed. It was not unlike a reading for lab or math class, where I am getting only a part of the whole answer, and I need to determine how it connects to previous readings, as well as predict what could follow from it. This aided me immensely in sorting through these massive files and made the organization process go relatively smoothly. I was rather fond of the comradery that developed between the interns. We were spending long days together in the office or in court, and we quickly realized that we needed to become friendly with each other, or it would be a miserable internship. By the end, there was a good understanding of everybody’s strengths and weaknesses, so that when we had a new problem presented to us, we could recommend who would be best for the job. That aspect of the internship I thought was very healthy for the workplace. That being said, there also developed a culture of avoiding taking initiative. The process for determining exactly what to keep and not keep was rather obtuse, and meant we had to frequently ask our supervisor for help. If she was unavailable or elsewhere in the office—which happened fairly often—we would sometimes throw things away or keep them on our own initiative, based on our training and previous experience with similar cases. After a while, though, we learned not to do so, as invariably our supervisor would return and tell us we had judged incorrectly according to the perplexing system that we felt we did not fully understand. This meant we became rather cautious as time went on, which slowed down our productivity quite a bit, and was rather frustrating at times. All told, I am glad that I did this internship. I learned a lot about the workings of court and of being a prosecutor. While I do not think I would necessarily want to work in criminal law, it certainly made me feel more comfortable about the prospect of law school and becoming an attorney. 25

Amos Elwell ‘25

OHSU’s, University Center of Excellence in Developmental Disabilities Portland, OR As a summer intern for the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU)’s University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD), I had a variety of responsibilities. First, as a member of the Summer Internship Program (SIP), I was responsible for the pre-work and attendance/participation in Professional Development Sessions. These were specially curated sessions to help us in our future careers as caretakers or health care providers; topics ranged from Trauma Informed Care to Disability Justice and A Healthy Life at Your Desk. Additionally, the SIP program organized a shadowing opportunity at the OHSU Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (LEND) clinic, where I was able to watch a Developmental Pediatrician, Occupational Therapist, Psychologist, Special Educator, Social Worker, and Speech Language Pathologist collaborate to diagnosis children with complex global developmental delays. Outside of the SIP program, through my supervisor, I was also able to shadow a General Pediatrician, and two speech language pathologists leading OHSU’s Autism Spectrum Disorder Clinic. As a part of my placement within Katharine Zuckerman’s Autism Alert Research Lab, I had three additional responsibilities: the provider interview project, quantitative data review, and qualitative data coding. The Provider Interview Project: This summer the Autism Alert team entered a new phase of their research: interviewing providers to identify potential factors causing providers to over- or under-refer their patients to Early Intervention services. Early Intervention (EI) is the main subject of the Autism Alert research project. “[Early Intervention] Is the term used to describe the services and supports that are available to babies and young children with developmental delays and disabilities and their families. EI may include speech therapy, physical therapy, and other types of services based on the needs of the child and family. These publicly funded programs provide services for free or at reduced cost for any child who is eligible.” (CDC June 6th, 2023) My job was to silently spectate these Zoom interviews and keep a log of the interview happenings on my memos. I was invited to provide constructive criticism and my thoughts on the interview process more generally. The interviews I was unable to spectate were recorded, transcribed, and viewed later for the development of our qualitative data codebook. Quantitative Data Review: While the Autism Alert project prioritizes the qualitative experiences of those going through the EI process, as a patient or as a provider, quantitative data allows the team to suggest changes to the EI process that have proven positive results for families and providers. For example, the team was able to help 83% of families in the intervention arm of the study access EI services, in comparison to 60% of the control arm, allowing them to suggest that the presence of Navigators increases a patient’s likelihood of receiving services. My job was to review and update two different data sets. I ensured previously entered data was accurate, and updated the data of children who had recently received an ASD or DD diagnosis that was not previously noted in the data set. One, ecWEB, is a database run by the University of Oregon, and helps the AA team track which children in the study had been referred, assessed, and/or provided with EI or ECSE services. The other, EPIC, allows the team to track the times 26

between referral, examination, diagnosis, and services. Qualitative Data Coding: Alongside my fellow interns and my supervisor, I developed a new codebook for the Autism Alert project’s interviews with primary care providers and pediatricians across Oregon. We wanted to highlight recurring themes that inform a physician’s decision-making process when a child shows early signs and symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder. This was done in Dedoose, a software where transcripts can be uploaded and coded. After the development of the codebook, the team and I began coding the interviews. This involved reviewing transcripts on Dedoose, and sorting each comment made by the provider into one or more of the themes we adopted into our codebook. My time at OHSU helped me better understand the different specialties that all work to provide care for individuals with autism and sparked a new interest in Speech Language Pathology. I gained familiarity with EPIC, Dedoose, and other software/databases, increasing my confidence to enter another clinical setting. Additionally, my supervisor and I agreed to extend my internship, allowing me remote, part-time work experience during the 2023-24 school year. OHSU was an excellent employer, and I would love to return to them after my internship ends and further explore Speech Pathology. Pictured left: Qualitative codebook developed by myself and my peer, in Dedoose.

Alexander Fodor ‘23

Awarehouse Productions College Park, MD Hosted by alumnus Jeremy Sheeler (A19) For two months during the summer of 2023 I interned at Awarehouse Productions under Jeremy Sheeler (A19). My internship was meant to give me an introduction into the world of video production and it did exactly that. It started out in medias res filming a music recital. Jeremy began teaching me the basics of camera and audio work while explaining the equipment to me as we set it up. Through this project, I also began to learn to use Adobe Premiere Pro for post-production. I spent a lot of time with this program, learning to use it from Jeremy, from YouTube tutorials, and from just fiddling around with it. Next to Premiere, Jeremy also showed me the basics of Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Audition. We used all three of these programs. The internship was hybrid and I spent a substantial part of it working from home. There are many projects I assisted with that required a lot of preliminary research. This is the work I was doing from home: finding people to reach out to for specific projects, compiling information, drafting emails, and reading. Jeremy and I were in contact via phone call and a shared document. I went into the office one day per week. Sadly, several projects fell through or were postponed even while I was working on them. While this was disappointing, it didn’t take away from the work being interesting. It also meant I got a real taste for the ups and downs of this line of work. A few weeks into the internship, I accompanied Jeremy to a shoot where I played the role of a production assistant. We were filming interviews for a documentary with eight interviewees over two days. My responsibilities ranged from carrying equipment and setting up to documenting the behind-the-scenes work and getting everyone lunch—assisting however I could. It was a small crew which allowed me to learn about the various moving parts and to ask questions about everything. These were my longest and most demanding days of work which were also very interesting and fulfilling. Since I was working so closely with Jeremy, I was able to really get to know all aspects of his work. We brainstormed ideas together and explored possible jobs. I accompanied him to budgeting and planning meetings—here my responsibility was merely keeping track of the important points. The chance to get such a broad perspective of the business was interesting and very helpful to me in thinking about my career. My internship overall was a great experience and I can see myself returning to this line of work.

Hannah Fodor ‘24

AlNour Marrakech Marrakech, Morocco This summer I worked full time as an intern at the Alnour Association in Marrakech Morocco. As an NGO, Alnour is dedicated to supporting women with disabilities in gaining socioeconomic independence. The path to socioeconomic independence is challenging without support through social services; as well as offering employment the Alnour Association works to provide accessible transportation, childcare, an accessible workspace, etc. When I applied to this internship, it was with the intent to gain insight into the work of Alnour and more generally of an NGO. Now I am happy to say that not only have I received this, but I have also played a role in this work and contributed to it. At Alnour I worked on internal strategy, communication for the website and social media, I provided skills training in Microsoft Excel to the women and completed grant applications. In order to complete a lot of these tasks it was important to understand the work of Alnour through getting to know the needs of the women they support and the societal context in which the NGO works. Being able to go to Marrakech for the internship was therefore a really helpful aspect of this internship. I do not think I could have grasped the importance of the work and the effect it has on individual lives without being there in person. Alnour is separated into two parts, it consists of the association which provides social services and the company which offers employment to women with disabilities. All the women have breakfast and lunch together every day and it is traditional to eat couscous every Friday in Morocco. A memorable part of my internship was being able to join everyone for lunch on Fridays, which I did twice, not only because the food was delicious but because it was great to see everyone sitting together and to be part of it. Some highlights from this summer were completing two grant applications for the NGO, as well as working on important strategy documents and collaborating on new content for the NGO’s website. The work that goes into completing a grant application for an NGO required that I not only understand exactly what the Association does but also to be able to explain this and answer very specific questions about the work. By getting to work on internal strategy documents I was given the freedom to think about the structure of an NGO and learn more about internal logistics. In working on social media and the website I was in more familiar territory than with the other tasks. I had previously interned at a startup which was building a website, through this I was able to use some of my knowledge about effective copywriting and other important aspects of this work. Most of the tasks I was given were projects I had not worked on before. Luckily, through the inter-disciplinary nature of St. John’s I was used to being faced with new challenges. In order to tackle these projects, I used the skills I have cultivated over the past three years, namely, to dissect the task at hand into smaller pieces to make it more easily digestible. Throughout my internship I was supported by mentors who really helped me work on further cultivating this skill.

Throughout my seven weeks at Alnour I enjoyed being given the responsibility to work on tasks independently while also having a team I could consult with and ask questions. The project manager and I worked very closely together as we were both on site, this was particularly helpful for immediate questions I had when completing a grant application for example. There were two consultants with whom I had weekly calls which provided a different kind of support. I found that having a weekly meeting helped me to consolidate my questions and in these calls I was also able to learn more about the work of NGOs generally. I enjoyed being able to see so many aspects of an NGO and am very lucky to have been able to work so closely with the Project Manager, consultants and the CEO and founder. I had wonderful mentors who were patient and willing to guide me through every step along the way of my internship. Being in Morocco was in itself an experience that taught me a lot. I am incredibly happy to have spent this time there and to have been surrounded by all the wonderful people at Alnour.

Georgia Galardi-Pittard ‘25

Julia Cooper (A20) with NBC Universal Los Angeles, CA This summer I was Julia Cooper’s minion. As her intern, I read and annotated scripts, wrote several pilot episodes of my own, and read articles and books that had the potential to be adapted into television series. For each article and book, I made storyboards, season-episode outlines, and brainstormed character development. One of my favorite projects was the research I did on a young girl who suffered from schizophrenia. This young girl had been comatose for 12 years. Doctors assumed that it was a symptom of schizophrenia but in fact, she simply needed to be treated for an undiagnosed autoimmune disease. After treatment, she woke up. Having personally suffered from autoimmune diseases, this seemed like a true nightmare. At one point in my research, I couldn’t tell whether I was so dedicated to this project because I thought it would make for a great thriller or because I was worried that when this eventually happened to me my doctors wouldn’t have enough research at hand. Because I was doing independent projects, much of this internship was self-driven. Hilariously, this was one of the most historical summers for entertainment writers, perhaps at times I felt unsure of what I should be doing or if I was doing it right. Each week, I went to Julia with any concerns I had and we hashed them out. She explained to me that being a writer is not having anything to do. You need to be your own boss, deciding what to do and when to do it. I would like to say that St. John’s prepared me for this internship but it didn’t. Ever since I was in elementary school, I’ve had no problem with unstructured work and am no stranger to the life of an artist. If anything, my experience in art school prepared me the most. If you love the art, no matter how taxing, you’ll do it. Playing the cello taught me that art can be beyond frustrating. Sometimes you hate the process and the product, but you love the thing. In this case, I love writing. Oftentimes I was frustrated, feeling as though I wasn’t writing anything funny or original. Hilariously, this was one of the most historical summers to do this particular internship. Most members of the Writer’s Guild of America were on strike due to unfair wages. With the relatively recent transition from cable television to streaming, writers have little to no job stability. Additionally, writers no longer receive residuals from past shows. This is because companies like Amazon purchase shows that do not air on cable. Writers often work on a project for three weeks, are paid a set amount, and then start looking for new work. I would be lying if I said that this didn’t align with the sexy image I had in my head of a “TV WRITER!” The idea of finding work every couple of months is far from appealing. However, I love writing and hopefully, this strike will significantly change how writers are treated.

Niovi Gennadiou ‘25

Athens Epidaurus Festival Athens, Greece Niovi (on the left)

For eight weeks, I interned at the annual “Athens Epidaurus Festival” cultural festival. The festival hosts Greek and international theatre and music productions. The facilities of the festival include the main office and four cultural centres in Athens. Three of them are the city's main historical ancient theatres; the last is a composition of many theatre rooms hosting more contemporary performances. When I first arrived in the main office, I was welcomed warmly. I had a meeting with the General Director of the festival. He was very kind and excited to welcome me and hear about my experience studying abroad as well as the particulars of my studies. We talked about the details of my internship and how my time would be divided. We agreed that it would be very beneficial to gain experience in both the organization and the production of the festival. For the next three weeks, I was mainly interning in the offices of the festival, helping the general´s assistant with many different tasks. Those tasks were mainly managing tickets for the staff, inviting VIP guests to the performances, welcoming any guests for various meetings, and answering emails sent by the audience of the festival. I was also managing the communication between the Director General and sponsors or VIP audience, and partners of the festival. Examples are the President of the French Institute in Greece, actors, musicians, and others. I was also part of the meetings that were happening between the Director, his assistant, and the Director of matters of law for the festival. In the office, there were a total of almost 60 people, working in everything related to the organization of the festival—law and financial management, ticket management, transportation of the artists, audience support and communication with partners, and the office of the Artistic director. Throughout the day, I interacted with workers from all the departments, became friends with many of them, and had the opportunity to gain an insight into their jobs and the role individuals played in the overall operation of something as complex as a three-month-long festival. On left, a musical performance, hosted by the festival.

However, that was only part of my summer experience. I had the opportunity to attend the performances of the festival. Almost every single day, I went to the theatres of the festival to experience the presentation of all the efforts of the workers of the festival—and the most beautiful part was that I felt part of this community that worked really hard to achieve this result. Many times, I was helping with the communication between those responsible for the tickets, the box office, and the audience. Every night, especially during a premiere, there was a social event that followed the performance. I was able to meet actors, musicians, and other people responsible for the production. The casual artistic setting allowed us to have deeper conversations and connect in an environment that was not limited to the work office. For my last weeks as an intern, I left the main office and went to work in the production part of the festival. I was at the Ancient Theatre of Herodus Atticus. It is a gorgeous ancient 32

theatre located directly next to the Parthenon! At this stage of my internship, I was in the theatre from 5:00 pm to 1:00 am. I experienced all the processes of a performance, from setting up the equipment, welcoming the artists, rehearsals, the arrival of guests and audience, the actual performance, and the processes that follow from the end of the performance until the closing of the theatre itself. Throughout the evening I was responsible for different tasks. For example, in the beginning of the evening, I welcomed the artists, the photographers, and the staff that were coming for sound checks and rehearsals. On left, during a performance at Herodus Atticus Ancient Theatre.

After most of the artists and staff had arrived, I went backstage and to the changing room to help out with receiving phone calls from the audience, and also helping the artists with questions about the program. During the performances, I was either attending the performance as a member of the audience or, as it happened most of the time, I remained backstage to help with any additional organizational task, such as last-minute arrivals of the audience. At the end of the evening, I was helping with the tidying up of the spaces as well as preparing for the upcoming performance the next day. The direct exposure to the art scene was amazing. I had the opportunity to meet the artists before and after the show. As I observed and helped out with the execution of the performance, I understood, in a level of complexity I have never before, the work and effort behind the scenes. Also interning in the actual theatre was a much more intense, but interesting experience since there were always unpredictable situations happening. But it was really useful to see how the managers of the theatre were handling all the last-minute changes and unexpected events. I have always been interested in working in the art world. I love performing theatre and music and I was curious to see the progress of the production from the beginning until the end. After this summer, I definitely feel interested in continuing to work in this world. I would ideally like to continue working in the organizational aspects of the performances as well as performing myself. I created great relationships with my co-workers, and I believe that these connections will be very useful in my future if I decide to pursue work in the production of the art scene in Athens. As of now, I accepted the position of Art Gallery assistant, here at the Santa Fe campus. I am very excited to apply the skills I have learned throughout my internship to my current job. Being a member of a close community, like St. John’s enriched me with the social skills to know how to approach my co-workers and build friendships and connections with them. Most importantly, I recognized that I did not need to be friends with all my co-workers, either because we were not compatible as characters or because they were exhibiting rude behaviors. Nonetheless, just like in a classroom at St. John’s, I´ve learned how to work together whenever necessary and respect others without needing to be friends with them outside the working environment. Additionally, I realized how useful the communication and conversation skills I developed in classes at St. John’s are in the context of a working environment since reading and replying to requests, and invitations requires paying close attention to the text and formulating well your own writing. During the meetings, it is really important to pay close attention to the other speakers while at the same time making your own opinion heard clearly and concisely. Being part of this experience has now created an unerasable mark within me of beautiful emotions, music, conversations, connections, and experiences. The multidimensionality of my experience created a holistic picture of what it means to run a cultural foundation. 33

Noah Hale ‘23

Santa Fe Reporter Santa Fe, NM My time at the Santa Fe Reporter this summer made it possible for me to learn common journalistic practices by practicing them, while also providing me with more creative freedom than larger newspapers and journals usually allow. I worked four days a week in the office and one day remotely when the paper went to press. On the days I was in the office, my work involved researching different subjects in town that I could possibly write about, conducting interviews, proofreading, fact checking, and of course the actual writing. Some of the work was assigned to me, especially in the first few weeks of my internship, but over time I was able to be more self-selective about what I wrote. On the one day when I was working remotely, I managed

the weekly’s social media accounts.

The workplace itself was intimate, and everyone there had known each other for years. It took me a while to feel like I “fit in,” but everyone there was friendly and willing to answer my questions. My mentor was also supportive and would often take me out to get a coffee and check in on how I was doing. Since everyone was close to one another, my days in the office felt very casual; there was a snack basket open to everyone, and sometimes my coworkers would leave to get food or run an errand. However, because some of us were in separate offices and communicated mostly through an app called Slack, it did sometimes feel like there wasn’t a lot of collaboration happening until it was time to proofread. I’d say communication was the most valuable skill I learned at St. John’s, and I wanted more opportunities to use it in the office. Thankfully, my research involved a lot of talking to people for information in my stories, and that was the most rewarding part of the entire internship. Some of my writing was also praised by my mentor and coworkers, which I attribute to having written so critically at St. John’s. One of the greatest drawbacks of the internship was the seemingly unrelated work that I was sometimes assigned to do. The most apparent example is how I was tasked with helping write the annual Best of Santa Fe issue that the Reporter publishes every summer. It was tedious, uninspiring work that took most of my time for about two and a half weeks, writing 40 to 75word blurbs about local businesses such as tire shops and insurance agencies. It wasn’t the kind of arts and culture work that I was expecting when I took on the internship, and I felt somewhat demoralized as a result. Still, most of the time I felt like I was really growing as a writer and reporter, and I now have more stories under my name that I can show future employers. This internship changed my perspective about what journalism can be: it can give you the freedom to explore different subjects with a voice distinctly your own, and people really do appreciate the work they do. At the Best of Santa Fe party, there were multiple people who walked up to our booth to thank us for all that we do. That said, journalism is something I might like to do in the future after I’ve more fully developed a recognizable personal voice, and because of its boldness and encouraged sense of freedom, I could definitely see myself working for an alternative weekly like the Reporter at some point. 34

Louise Harden ‘26

Sid the Cat Productions Los Angeles, CA A day at Sid the Cat starts with an arrival typically one hour before doors open for the show (after spending twenty minutes finding parking, of course). I step into one of the many venues I spent longs nights wallflowering at in high school, but unlike then, the midday sun still shines through the windows (stained glass at Pico Union Project, noir-style slats at the Ebell, through iron bars at Permanent Records Roadhouse) and these spaces are distinctly different now that it's part of my job to contribute to the magic that happens inside them. I check in with my bosses, the founders of the company, to see what I’m needed for this evening. Often I’m stamping hands at the door while my coworker, Katrine, scans tickets. I might be heaving bundles of t-shirts out of plastic crates, playing the bands “merch girl” for the night, or feigning authority as a bodyguard for the artist-only entries. More often than not, whatever role I occupy also means I get to watch the show. Some of the most brilliant musicians in LA or in the entire country, every other night of the week. And when the show ends, the interns stick around for the heavy lifting. Depending on the venue, we might have to break down the gear on the stage, but with lots of hands, it goes pretty quick. We wait for everyone to trickle out of the venue, and then I drive the nighttime freeway back to the other side of the city, bass still ringing in my ears. One small epiphany I had early on in this internship was the realization that my job was essentially conversation. At the merch stand, I’d end up chatting music more than I was peddling wares—but this wasn't slacking off, it was part of the gig. I had to learn how to talk my way around an ego when having to tell someone “you're not on the list,” or when they’d scoff when I asked for ID (“she doesn't know who I am?”). Most of the hour before the show was just dinner with my co-interns and bosses, talking away. The company is so small in terms of personnel that I am speaking directly to the founders of it every single day, not to mention the weekly check-ins over zoom where I could ask for personal feedback from the very top of the company. I had proximity to these mentors who wanted nothing more than to share the things they’d learned over their time building Sid the Cat, and what it takes to have integrity, belief, and care in a business that often throws those things to the wind in favor of cash or algorithmic push. It was often seminar that I found myself thinking of during these conversations. Something had changed over the past year. Before, I had a habit of letting a conversation just fizzle out, racking my brain for something interesting to say. Now, it seems I never found myself without a next question to ask. The aspect of seminar that involves really listening to what someone is saying and identifying your true curiosities meant I was asking all the right questions, not just the ones that came to mind first. Not just doing the work, but doing it “with intention,” as my boss, Brandon once said, was also something I picked up at school. Examining the purpose of a seemingly mundane task like writing social media content, and identifying how to communicate 35

in the most concise and effective way was a skill I surely picked up from Johnnie writing assignments. Suffice it to say, I loved the summer I spent with Sid the Cat and my interest in working in live music has not been stymied. My bosses said they’d be happy to have me back, but this summer did open up my idea about what a job in music could look like outside of Sid the Cat. I find myself more curious about tour management or A&R and I now have resources that can point me in the right direction. All my coworkers and co-interns are passionate, driven individuals who I’m sure I will meet again when I return to the LA music scene. It is their presence that made the job as enjoyable as it was. I thrive when I am surrounded by others who care as deeply and earnestly as I do about the things they’re working on, which is also why St. John’s is such a positive place for me as a learner. To friends, I often described my internship this summer as a “fake job” because even though I was always occupied with a show, or, during the day, distributing promotional materials around the city, writing or producing social media content, emailing local outlets to promote shows (you get the gist), it never once felt like the slog I’d worried it could be. It’s an opportunity I would not have been able to pursue without the support of the Hodson grant and the Career Services office, and I offer my sincere thanks.

Nelli Harutyunyan ‘24 EduNetwork LLC Yerevan, Armenia During my spring semester at St. John's College, I was offered an internship position in a company called EduNetwork. While relatively new in the market, EduNetwork has quickly become one of the leading educational companies in Armenia, and neighboring countries. The company cooperates with academic institutions all over the world, offering various academic programs as well as assistance to students in finding and applying to their dream schools. I was lucky to work with the EduNetwork team this summer in particular, when a lot of new partnerships with universities in Europe and the Middle East were made, as the company was preparing for their annual college fair in Yerevan, Armenia. My responsibilities varied throughout the summer. During the first few weeks, I assisted with completing the application and essays of all the students applying to universities in the EU. During those weeks, my education and extensive writing experience at St. John’s helped to guide the students to reveal their full potential in their writing. I helped them prepare for the interviews, focusing on effective communication techniques, that I myself actively worked on throughout my time at St. John’s. Simultaneously, I did a lot of research for clients looking for specific types of schools and universities in different parts of the world. In early July, a representative from Schloss Krumbach International Boarding School in Austria announced the beginning of the competition for a limited amount of full scholarship opportunities for high school students in Armenia and neighboring countries. EduNetwork, as the main partner in the region, was responsible for selecting the first group of students who would later go through the final selection process with the admissions committee from Austria. The project was challenging considering how limited our time was and the workload from tasks that I maintained throughout the summer. My least favorite part was assisting with the final stages of the advertisement of the school through social media and in various local institutions. Luckily, the project soon became very engaging as I was trusted to come up with the application questions and conduct the majority of the interviews of the students who were applying for the scholarship. The art of asking the right questions which we focus on so much at St. John’s was particularly important during the interviews. In a short time, my colleagues and I had to understand whether the student was prepared both academically and psychologically to live in a different country alone and complete one of the hardest high school programs. It was a very responsible task since being selected to attend this school would drastically change the lives of those students. We had a large number of applicants to access, but thanks to the full commitment of everyone on the team, we were able to choose five finalists from the hundreds that we interviewed. After various tasks and projects that I completed during the summer, my mentor offered me a possible work position upon my graduation from college. If I decide to return to Armenia, this can be a great opportunity since there is still so much to learn and to work on in the education field back home.

Zeinep Ibragim Kyzy ‘24

Akyltai (children’s publication) Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan At Akyltai, I interned full-time for the Editor-in-Chief. I offered my skills in communications and visual design that I learned over my last summer’s internship at Plant-for-the-Planet. My main work was visual design and proof-reading of the material in the publication. I also helped out with the media team and the distribution team. I took care of the logistical issues with the publishing house and organized/attended trips to distribute the magazines in rural places in Kyrgyzstan. Since this is a small publication, I worked in a team with a total of three employees, which made my work very crucial and helpful to the team. It was also incredible to work in an environment that only had women employees and a female editor-in-chief. My most important contributions to the publication were creating a new, more modern design template which made the visuals of the magazine less outdated. The new design template created a unity within the pages of the magazine by enforcing a clear color palate. It was exciting to be in an environment that was Kyrgyz-speaking and focused on decolonization in the country. I enjoyed attending events and representing the values of the publication. It is very unusual to have an organization that is only Kyrgyz-speaking in my country, therefore many people were interested in the political message of the organization. I was excited to talk to children in the rural villages, where we distributed the magazines, about the importance of conserving the Kyrgyz language. It was difficult balancing my Projects-for-Peace project alongside the Hodson internship this summer. Especially since I committed to a full-time Hodson internship. However, I benefited from Akyltai being a small-scale company, as I could complete my tasks at the office at irregular hours. When I interned in the legal department over the summer of 2022, I felt myself enjoying the work I did for the media and communications team more. The social media team seemed to appreciate my creativity and willingness to learn, and I was offered a full-time position as an onsite journalist at Plant-for-the-Planet. This year, I decided to fully commit myself to working in a creative atmosphere to see whether I should scrap the idea of going to law school altogether and focus on a career in media and visual design. The internship at Akyltai showed me what it is like to work fully in a creative industry. Even though I really enjoyed all of my tasks and felt like I learned a lot about the industry, I realized that the creative industry did not challenge me enough intellectually. I did not feel like I was problem-solving nor tackling important issues in the world. I realize that a children’s publication in Kyrgyz addresses issues like rights for education and decolonialism from our past Russian influences, but the work that I did at the publication did not make me think about these issues directly, but only gave me ideas on how I could expand on those issues with other kinds of work. Although I satisfy my urge to create, I lose sight of what issues motivate my creativity. From these reflections, I have decided that I would try to utilize my creativity within the scope of my legal education. I am very grateful for the opportunity given to me by the Hodson award to explore the media industry. I would not have been able to afford working in an unpaid position, exploring a role that I am so deeply curious about, otherwise. Thank you for choosing me as a Hodson stipend recipient! 38

Songeun Jang ‘24

Social Learning Lab, Boston University Boston, MA For the summer of 2023, I spent my time in Boston as a research assistant at the Social Learning Lab which is part of Boston University. I worked on two main research projects. One is called the Developing Belief Network, and the other one is a new research project related to children’s understanding of financial mobility. For the first two months, I mainly worked with the first research project, and my responsibility was to transcribe the interviews that are conducted so that they can be converted into data. During late July and my last few weeks, I also started working with my mentor on her research on financial mobility by recruiting and running tests on participants. The work that was given to me was not as interesting as I had wished, but the experience of working at the lab and with graduate students and post-docs was very insightful. I realized I had a different understanding of what research is before I started this summer, and after this internship, I believe I have experienced at least a bit of how research is being conducted in academia. Moreover, spending time with the graduate students and postdocs, I was able to receive a lot of valuable feedback and suggestions regarding my own career plans and what their experiences had been. This experience did not change my academic goal but has enhanced it by showing me what exactly going into a PhD program will be like. I will start applying to a few PhD programs related to Cognitive Science this fall as I planned before this internship. To be honest, I still feel quite lost with what I want to do, but I can find myself, after this internship, knowing that conducting research will be enjoyable for me. It is quite similar to writing an annual essay that all Johnnies are familiar with, but it just consists of a few more technical processes of collecting data and analyzing them. Even though I didn’t enjoy the work of transcribing itself, I do like what they are doing with the data that I have collected. Because it is summer, not a lot of people work at the lab. Most people are working remotely or on breaks. I personally also wasn’t required to be at the lab. So, I wasn’t able to experience the lab culture to the fullest which is the only thing that I felt like I kind of missed out on. Even though I do not think I will apply to Boston University and the Social Learning Lab, it is mainly because the research and study I want to conduct is not related to children or development. I think the lab environment at the Social Learning Lab is great, and everyone is super nice. I recommend this research to students who are interested in children's developmental psychology.

Anastasios Katakos ‘25 Inno-Lan-D E.P.E Athens, Greece

During the summer, I had the opportunity of interning full time in Inno-lan-D E.P.E, a Greek consulting company which primarily deals with European funding in public and private interest companies, their acquisition and logistical support for our clients. My main responsibilities were to research for new opportunities regarding European funds, and for any new updates on already existing, ongoing funding programs of interest to our clients. I had to first translate and then summarize any new changes or opportunities and report them at the weekly meetings to my co-workers, who would then communicate them to our clients and support them with logistical planning and execution. Moreover, throughout the internship I had to prepare a presentation of a funding opportunity which I would find, to any client that seemed suitable to me, all with the help and monitoring of my mentor. As expected, the first two weeks of the internship were extremely stressful, and it was uncomfortable to take my first steps in a field that I had absolutely no experience with. However, with a genuine interest and excitement for anything new, a skill that I think characterizes me, I was able to quickly adapt and learn the ropes. As good as excitement and genuine interest might be they need to be utilized properly. I was lucky enough to truly employ them and turn them into a careful examination to the nature of what I was doing, which most of the time, had to do with reading translating and demonstrating things, skills that I have developed, and I feel comfortable with because of my time in St. John’s. Another St. John’s skill that proved most useful in the beginning of my internship was the ability to ask questions and turn the attention toward useful information, something that created extreme volumes of knowledge for me but also for my co-workers. Generally, I loved the collaborative and extremely good and welcoming environment of the whole company. I think that healthy collaboration, mutual respect and even friendship pressured me in a nice and healthy way to fulfill my responsibilities and even assume some more, which I was naturally suited for, like navigating through the bureaucratic public offices of the tax offices or proposing new ideas for funds. Responsibilities I would not have the initiative to assume if I was not genuinely willing to help my co-workers and the company. Of course, there was a downside, really fast I was in danger of getting overwhelmed and assuming much more than I could handle, something that would have threatened all my experience. Balancing good nature and professionalism was a challenge and there were times that it was mandatory for me to take a step back. My main and final personal project was successful, but its main objective was to develop and improve my presence in a professional environment. Most of the aforementioned skills and strengths are generally based on an extremely polite and good nature but casual behavior. Having the opportunity to formally present a piece of work in front of clients was extremely demonstrative of the strengths it can provide to one but surely a step out of my comfort zone. 40

Although I think I succeeded it was clear for me that this is going to be one of the biggest challenges in my future plans and I have a long way to go to combine my natural causality with a professional attitude. All in all, I am really thankful for the opportunity the Hodson internship program gave me to explore this field of work and my presence in it. I gained a lot of knowledge both for myself and the field I was working in. I was extremely surprised to see the ways that my education at St. John’s was not only relevant, but right in the center of the modern procedures in a company. Although I would work again for Inno-lan-d E.P.E I would only do so because of the people I met there and not because of the specific focus of the field. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to utilize money from the European Union to help smaller companies and organizations, but I would certainly try more things before I have a corporate job like that again.

Gelila Kebede ‘25

Mother and Child Rehabilitation Center Addis Ababa, Ethiopia This summer I had the opportunity to return to the Mother and Child Rehabilitation Center where I worked last summer. Although MCRC started as a foundation that helped underprivileged children, due to the increase of gender-based violence in Ethiopia, the organization now specifically works with helping children and mothers. The foundation works on separating children whose homes have sexual or physical violence to give the children a safe environment to live in. Some of the necessities the shelter provides include housing, clothing, education, psychological and medical attention, and protection from certain aspects of the outside world. Since some of these children have been displaced mid-academic year or have had to completely drop out of school they have fallen behind or are on a completely different schedule than the academic schedule in their class. As a result, they needed intensive support to catch up with their academic grade for the upcoming year. Because of the trauma the children were dealing with they all needed different kinds of support. Consequently, it took connecting with each child on an individual basis to understand what the specific needs of the child were. I quickly had to realize one method did not work for the other. In acknowledgment of this, the organization gathered up all the children that were falling behind academically or needed special assistance to help them catch up with their classmates. However, due to the lack of available teachers, it meant that there were different grades in the same classroom that all needed my assistance. My duties as an intern were to teach students from grades four to eight, math, science, and English. The different grades posed a challenge because this meant I was not able to teach traditionally, but instead had to assign every student different work at their academic level and provide assistance in completely different concepts, rather than teaching an entire class a singular concept. However, it was in the moments I had to think quickly on my feet and quickly articulate a completely different thought that I was able to acknowledge the extent I’ve grown as a Johnnie. Explaining various topics at once was an extremely demanding task that required a lot of attention and focus. In addition, during their break times, I was responsible for taking care of them and making sure they had eaten and were playing safely. MRCR not only has an extremely praiseworthy mission but has actively been making change in Ethiopia. One child at a time. One mother at a time. With an amazing staff and cooperative coworkers, they have not only made a safe home for the children but also for me. Within my work environment, I felt extremely connected to the mission, children, coworkers, and the complete community as a whole. They fostered an environment where, along with the students, I too felt it was a safe space to express my desires and needs. The staff took a very personal interest in every student and made adjustments to tailor the academic program to each student’s needs, which better allowed the children to thrive. In addition to being so kind and caring each staff member taught me life lessons I will carry for the rest of my life. I not only gained teaching experiences but genuine life experiences. I have become a better person because of my time volunteering at MCRC. I would love to take a moment to genuinely thank everyone who made it possible for me to attain this experience. I am extremely appreciative of MCRC for giving me the opening to come and teach and for the Hodson Committee for funding and supporting my future career.

Sybil Kushnir ‘24

Maryland Office of the Public Defender, Parental Defense Division Baltimore, MD This past summer, I worked as an intern in the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, Parental Defense Division. The focus of this office is on parental custody disputes in cases where the Department of Social Services is involved—these cases are often very complex, involving the interests of both parents, the child, foster parents or relatives, and the Department. The job of the public defender is at once to serve as the legal representation for a parent in one of these cases when they cannot afford to retain a lawyer otherwise, but as CINA hearings—child in need of assistance— are not criminal matters themselves, the role of the lawyer extends beyond the courtroom to making sure the parent is well equipped both to win their case and to create a safe environment for their child or children. As an intern, my job was to work closely with the lawyer I was assigned to—Heather Tierney—to make sure that cases went smoothly. This entailed digging through case files to find specific pieces of information; helping to draft documents for discovery requests and other motions that need to be filed; assisting in the “theory” of the case—that is, an idea of the legal and rhetorical route to winning; reading and summarizing discovery generated by our requests; attending court hearings; and contacting clients and witnesses to conduct preliminary interviews and gather information that would be useful in court. Having spent three years at St. John’s College studying the program was extremely useful to helping me navigate my job duties. On a mundane level, the amount of close reading required in a short turnaround by the rigors of certain seminar texts allowed me to power through long discovery documents quickly. The interpersonal communication that is constantly stressed and developed through our discussion-based classes came in handy both in summarizing relevant information from discovery, but also in communicating with clients and witnesses, as I was able to serve as an intermediary between the often-arcane writing of court orders or lawyer-speak and clients who often aren’t familiar with this way of talking. Being able to clearly convey the ideas that were necessary for the case was almost certainly a fork of the skills I have developed at St. John’s while trying to parse out difficult texts in conversation. The work environment was very fast paced. This wasn’t an issue—I came prepared to deal with this, knowing that public defenders are often saddled with heavy caseloads, but it did lead to a feeling of lacking focus—I wasn’t ever working on just one project, it was always several in tandem. I only worked on a fraction of the cases that my supervising attorney was assigned to as well—so I can only imagine the real work of the public defender was much, much more involved. That said, I quite liked how there was always something to do, and it always felt like it was something that was genuinely important to the outcome of the case. Though it was stressful, it was a good motivator to not fall behind. The more work I was able to do, it felt, the greater impact I was able to have. Now—as much as I liked the work I was doing, the job of the public defender is that of defense—to intercede after an alleged wrong has been done and hold the enforcement arms of the government accountable. Hence why we have the constitutional right 43

to representation in the first place, lest the government overstep constantly. Thus, on the one hand, I felt like I was taking part in an integral piece of how our justice system functions and self regulates. On the other hand, working so closely with people, at such a small scale, and in a way that feels a little too fast and too uncertain, left me feeling like there was always so much more in the world to fix than I ever could tackle myself. It was honestly a little discouraging. I don’t have any grand delusions about fixing the world all by myself, but it can be frustrating to be in a position to help in a way that feels almost Sisyphean. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to participate in an integral part of our judiciary. My career thoughts have changed a bit, though—I’m not sure if I see myself pursuing legal work straight out of college, at least not in the way that I just did. Being able to work on projects that feel like they make a difference for real people is something that was and is deeply important to me, and my internship has further affirmed this. I’m not sure that the law is the right venue for me to apply this passion, though. All this being said, if I do pursue law, or even if I don’t, the work I did at the Maryland Office of the Public Defender was exhilarating and important to me. While I don’t know if it will be the first thing I do out of college, it’s not something I want to rule out. I could absolutely see myself working there in the future, and enjoying the work deeply.

Madelyn Minor '24

International Rescue Committee, Charlottesville Office Charlottesville, VA This summer I worked as an Immigration Legal Services (ILS) intern at the Charlottesville IRC. The IRC is a multifaceted international organization which helps refugees and other people who have fled their countries due to war, political strife, or persecution. The role of the Legal Services team is to help these people apply for various types of status adjustments (Green Card, citizenship, etc.) and family reunification petitions after they’ve arrived in the U.S. We act as a mediator between the client, who is often distressed and with very little English, and the USCIS, which has many complicated forms all written in English. My daily work was divided between client meetings, phone calls, emails, and texts, and drawing up applications once I'd attained the necessary information. I felt the advantages of my Johnnie education quite a bit when meeting with clients—listening carefully and keeping an open mind to what my clients were saying was how I excelled in my role, and that’s partially something I cultivated in listening to classmates, tutors, and the great books themselves. Empathetic communication was perhaps the most important skill in my toolbox, and I continued to improve it throughout the internship. Something else I can thank St. John’s for--my French came in handy! I was able to act as an emergency French interpreter for walk-in clients on occasion. Something that really helped me learn about the IRC and get the most out of my time there was making use of volunteer opportunities within the organization, outside the ILS department. Clients generally meet with almost all the departments at one stage or another of their resettlement, so volunteering for Youth Services events gave me insight into the sorts of things they had to deal with when signing their kids up for school, for example. I started volunteering regularly as a classroom assistant for the ESL and Cultural Orientation classes on Tuesdays and Fridays, and this gave me a glimpse of what a tremendous amount of active learning is required for immigrants. Thursdays were all-staff meetings, and I could talk to caseworkers, employment specialists, and coworkers from other departments whom our little isolated ILS wing did not have the pleasure of sharing a watercooler with. Two areas that seemed right up my alley were Volunteer Coordination and Language Services. I loved how many community members were involved in helping the IRC through volunteering, donating, or even just turning out to the Monticello Citizenship Ceremony on July 4th. Community-building is becoming a hobby of mine! One of my favorite parts of the job was working in a highly multicultural environment. Many of my coworkers (and I had some really cool coworkers!) were refugees themselves, who had started as interpreters and worked their way up. It felt like for every word of English, I heard three of a different language. I used Google voice to text and call clients, so my inbox was always filled with Arabic, Kurdish, Spanish, Dari, Pashto, Russian, Nepali, Swahili, you name it (Google Translate, my beloved). Some cultural flair in communication beyond black-letter language was interesting to note, too: For instance, I've had a statistically intriguing number of Arabicspeaking female clients who send rose emojis at the end of every text conversation. And many people used a higher register of formality with me than I was used to, which I tried (semisuccessfully) to return. I'm not used to being called ma'am... There were certain dispositions I 45

started to associate with different stages of the road to citizenship, too. Citizenship applicants were often very excited to talk about where they came from, while Green Card applicants were usually more closed off, just trying to get by with Google Translate. But every individual was unique and so much more than the misspelled names on their government records. There were a lot of lighthearted moments where personalities could show through, especially with big families. I had to ask clients their eye color for Green Card intakes, which often got funny reactions during in-person meetings. Once I had a grown man open his eyes wide, point to them and flutter his eyelashes at me, which made his wife crack up. Sometimes clients would bring their kids or friends, and there'd be babies crawling over tables and little girls braiding each other's hair and elderly women bouncing grandchildren, so it was often very lively. But then there would be times when lone clients, separated from their families by distance or death, would come in, and it was impossible not to be affected. Sometimes I would come out of meetings and have to take a really, really big breath. One of the most rewarding parts of the job was doing family reunification cases, but the hardest news I had to give was telling a distraught woman that the IRC could not assist her in bringing her sisters over, as siblings aren't eligible for reunification by the USCIS. So there were very heavy moments too. Sometimes clients were angry, and justifiably so! The process is horribly convoluted and stressful. Sometimes clients called in the middle of the night, panicked over a threatening document they had found in their mail. Sometimes applications are stuck pending years beyond the normal wait, without a reason given. As much as I loved working with clients, my hands were often tied to a degree intolerable for someone who always wants to jump up and fix things. I’d rather get at the root of the problem, so I’ve started sniffing around for different careers in the field, weighing out where it's possible to make the biggest dent. I think the first step is law school. My plan from here is to work for a year and study for the LSAT, then a JD, then try to make a difference. Maybe I'll come back to the IRC someday—if not as an employee, then as a volunteer!

El’ad Nichols-Kaufman ‘25

Annapolis Comprehensive Planning Department City of Annapolis Annapolis, MD I have long been interested in studying urban planning and learning more about the practical work of a planning department, so in that sense the internship I participated in was perfect for exploring that field of work. Even more than that, though, I found that this internship gave me a new way of understanding my own Annapolis community, and how urban planning is inseparable from the everyday social ties that bind a city together. Before this summer, I had lived in Annapolis for two years, yet had relatively little understanding of the city as a whole. Certainly, I knew downtown and its history well, I snatched up every book I could find about the city’s colonial roots and its storied residents, but beyond this small peninsular segment, I was very much unaware of the wider community in which I lived, and knowingly or unknowingly contributed to in many ways. During this internship, that all changed. I was lucky to begin just as the City’s comprehensive plan, Annapolis Ahead 2040, was being released, and my first task was proofreading that 400page document, which gave me a tremendous bird’s eye view of the city on paper. What followed, however, gave me the understanding that I found most valuable: I attended and helped staff a series of public meetings around the city, in churches, libraries, recreational centers, community centers and even a restaurant, where I had the chance to hear people from across the city voice their hopes, concerns and desires. Here, the interpersonal skills developed in our seminars were most useful: I was able to speak with people who had strong disagreements with the plan and anything related to it, and found ways to productively steer the arguments towards ideas for improvement of the document. I also put together presentations on a variety of topics that the planning department was working on, from kayak storage to cannabis regulations, and worked on a final project looking at ways to reduce impervious cover in parking lots within the parameters of the city’s current parking requirements. All of this required reading, writing and research skills which, while not necessarily directly the focus of our classes, can easily be developed alongside them at St John’s. From this internship, I learned not only about the city and about the art of planning, but about collaborating in a small, tightly knit workplace. I enjoyed getting to know the other people in the office, and the different learning experiences that each of them offered. I hope to find other workplaces with similar close connections and common goals of improving the community in the future. My mentor particularly was an excellent teacher and did everything he could to guide me along the way to gaining a more thorough understanding of planning. The internship was hybrid, and from that I learned that I am far too prone to procrastination on days I was working from home, and that I was not learning as much when I wasn’t able to come into the office. Going forward I hope to find ways to better focus when working remotely, and explore more possibilities focused on in-person work. 47

By learning more about the city in this internship, I also learned more about my initial goal, deciding whether or not I wanted to pursue it professionally, than I could have otherwise. I learned that a good planner is not only well read on the theory about what makes the best livable, equitable, safe and healthy communities, but is also a good communicator of these ideas, and a good listener to community voices. While this certainly seems more challenging, it also is in some ways a more motivating goal, and something I aspired towards. This summer’s internship has driven me towards looking deeper into the world of planning, and I hope to continue taking the lessons that the Annapolis community has taught me this summer and bringing them to whatever other planning opportunities I may pursue.

Alexander Paden ‘25

Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s Office of Maryland Annapolis, MD My internship with the State’s Attorney’s Office had two primary components. The first was case management and archiving. This consisted of entering the materials and information used by prosecutors in old cases into a new, digital database called Prosecutor by Karpel. I would read over the materials, scanning them into P.b.K., and afterward either discard or retain the physical copies. The decision whether to discard or retain was based upon the significance of the crime and its resulting sentence, which in turn were indicators of the likelihood that the defendant or case could come up again for litigation. This work was necessary both because transitioning to digital storage saved the office space, and because cases have been known to be relitigated up to fifty years after their initial conclusion. The second component of my internship consisted of watching hearings and trials. Over the course of the summer, I sat in on numerous sentencing and plea hearings, two murder trials, and a week-long civil case. Observing these proceedings provided a valuable opportunity for me to further determine whether I enjoy and was suited to legal work. In time, I was able to identify standard practices that lawyers on both sides of a case used. I gained an appreciation for the arguments being made and began to evaluate the central issues and facts in the cases I watched. Initially, the prospect of trial work intimidated me. However, as I became familiar with it, I became more comfortable with the idea of arguing before the court myself. My work at St. John’s College prepared me for both components of my internship. Being able to process and sort through information quickly, both skills which are developed in reading the classics, was key in my case management work. Further, identifying central facts, issues, and arguments was a skill that began at St. John’s, but came to fruition observing trials. Whether the argument is Aristotle’s or a prosecutor’s, the process for evaluating them is the same. We identify facts, establish principles, and then apply those principles to the facts. The task of those observing the court, or reading the text, remains evaluating whether that application was persuasive. As a result of this internship, seeing how it intertwines with the work I already enjoy at SJC, my career goals have not so much changed, as solidified. I am more firmly committed to a legal career than before and hope to soon begin preparing to apply to law school. However, I have also determined that the work of a prosecutor is not for me, and I do not anticipate working in the S.A.O. While criminal cases are interesting, I have a more pressing interest in international law, which falls more into the civil arena. Nonetheless, the foundation of the work is the same, and I now know that I enjoy it thoroughly. The work environment at the S.A.O. was pleasant enough. My fellow interns and I got along very well, as people who share a common interest in legal work tend to be similar in other respects. There were several occasions where we had conversations that would not have been out of place at a seminar table. Further, we were mostly allowed to work independently and at the hours that suited us, creating a relatively relaxed atmosphere. The only difficulties that arose in this environment were the result of interns coming and going at different times over the course of 49

the summer. For example, we were not all trained with the same level of rigor. This, coupled with occasionally inconsistent communication from our supervisor, meant that we made mistakes and were given admonitions that could have been avoided. Overall, though, I would seek to replicate the regular hours and quiet office of the last two months of my life. I found both the setting and the work to be enjoyable, which I know is going to be vital for any sort of legal career.

Millie Ransohoff ‘26

Rehab2Perform Annapolis Annapolis, MD This summer, I participated in an internship at Rehab2Perform in Annapolis through the Hodson Program. Rehab2Perform is a fitness-focused physical therapy practice that places an emphasis on individualized care. I became interested in physical therapy after receiving treatment for injuries sustained in ballet classes several years ago, and I first became aware of R2P when I was a patient there during that time. I really appreciated the R2P method then, so when I decided to look into physical therapy as a possible career path through an internship, I knew that I wanted to intern there specifically. The day-to-day experience of the internship consisted primarily of observing the physical therapists as they worked with patients, assisting patients with their exercises, and cleaning equipment as it was used. Shadowing the physical therapists during appointments gave me the opportunity to learn about anatomy and muscle structure, and why different exercises are appropriate for different kinds of injuries (i.e. when to give an eccentric vs. a concentric exercise). I found those things very interesting, just as I had when I was a patient. I also had the opportunity to complete a small research project at the end of my internship. I chose to research the psoas muscle group, because I remembered being told by ballet teachers that that muscle group is important for leg extensions, but I did not previously have a comprehensive understanding of how it functions. I found that project interesting and rewarding as well. I definitely learned a lot during the internship. The office as a whole was a surprisingly social environment. There are constantly many patients in the office, several physical therapists, graduate students, and other interns as well. Before this internship, I of course knew that working in a clinical environment means developing personal relationships with each patient, but something about that aspect of the job still surprised me a bit. Since I was in the office for the same two-hour window every day, I was often there at the same time as the same group of patients, and so I got to begin to develop relationships with them, and of course I got to know the physical therapists, grad students, and other interns as well. I enjoyed that experience, because everyone was very kind and the office environment was nice, but I ultimately found that the clinical environment may be too social of a work environment for me. I was surprised that I felt that way, because I consider myself a generally social person, but it just did not feel like a good fit for me. I found myself thinking that I might prefer to work in research, and the site director at R2P suggested that direction as well, since the aspects of the experience that I enjoyed the most were tied to research rather than to clinical practice. I did not know that I might prefer a career in research until having this experience, and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to learn that this summer. This internship was definitely a great experience. I feel that I learned a lot, enjoyed myself while doing so, and got a better sense of what I might like to do in my future career. I am very grateful both to Hodson and to Rehab2Perform Annapolis for the experience that I had this summer. 51

Lainey Rendelman ‘26

Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp Baseball Club Jacksonville, FL As an intern at the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, I got to try out many different roles that one may have while working in sports media. Some of the roles I had the privilege of learning how to do included writing the game notes, creating the lineup cards, updating the team’s roster, posting promotions on social media, creating pregame social media content and in game content for socials, clipping highlights for socials, writing feature stories, serving as a radio producer for ESPN690, conducting pregame player radio interviews, and hosting a segment on the pregame radio show. One of the most frequently asked questions I received pertained to my education: “Why would you go to a school like St. John’s if you want to work in Sports Broadcasting?” My answer to this question remains the same: St. John’s is teaching me through seminar how to be an effective communicator. This skill is pertinent when it comes to hosting the pregame radio show and conducting player interviews. The seminar style learning at St. John’s has taught me what I believe to be the most important part of communication: listening. My ability to communicate what I needed but also to actively listen to what those around me needed and what they were saying aided my daily internship and helped me to excel. During interviews, having prepared questions was incredibly important, but what I implemented from my education was utilizing a set of opening questions and allowing the conversation to flow naturally. This made for fruitful interviews and assisted in creating connections with the athletes. I was lucky enough to learn from one of the best broadcasters in the International League. Scott Kornberg taught me how to write in the AP style, which is not how we write at St. John’s. Scott also gave me unprecedented access to players for interviews. As the summer progressed, I worked with Matt Davis, the Number two broadcaster, and created my own segment in the pregame show called The Rendelman Report; I started with a prerecorded segment and worked my way to the live show. This summer has helped me confirm that a career in sports is the path I wish to pursue. The diversity of the internship allowed me to explore so many different aspects of sports media and to narrow down what I do and don’t want to pursue further. It also aided me in finding what I need to focus on improving. Though my career goals have not changed per say, they have become more specific. I know now that I want to work as a sideline reporter for a baseball team. I also learned that I really enjoy the statistical analysis that goes into constructing the daily game notes and that stats may be another area of sports to explore. Working to help run the socials also showed me another area of sports media that I enjoyed working in. I posted daily line ups, highlights celebrations, and promotional materials. The work environment was incredibly supportive and conductive to learning. Everyone was encouraged to 52

voice what they did and did not want to do. There was no expectation that an intern would have to do a task they did not wish to do. The obvious theme of being a woman in sports was the most difficult thing to work around. I had different access, I was referred to as ‘the girl intern who wears dresses’, rather than by my name, and there were some people who were not thrilled to have a woman near the clubhouse, but that will be a continual theme throughout my career and it did not overshadow any of my internship. Once I proved myself and my knowledge of the sport, I gained the respect of most of the athletes, which went a long way. This is a culture that unfortunately is still very prevalent in sports, and I hope to one day be in a position where I can help affect some sort of change but currently it remains an unavoidable truth. But the positives far outweigh the negatives and I hope to find a future workplace as supportive as the environment created by my mentor Scott Kornberg. There is a position at the Jumbo Shrimp that may become available once I graduate, so there may be a chance of future employment. However, it would not be a sideline reporter position or along that track so I would have to weigh all my options. But I know the network I created this summer will help me break into the field and to live up to my full potential. The grant from the Hodson Institution afforded me the opportunity to chase after a dream without having to worry about financial insecurity. I have known that I wanted a career around baseball since I was twelve, and this summer, with the assistance of the Hodson Institute and the Career Development office, I got to experience the life I have always dreamed of.

Antonina Schlussman ‘24

Touchstones Discussion Project Stevensville, MD What I learned through a summer interning at Touchstones is that I never want to work a 9:00-5:00 day in an office. Although I came to this conclusion very early on in the internship, my time throughout it ratified this conviction more and more. I am grateful for having been given this opportunity that led me to so much clarity about my future and many valuable lessons about myself and others. Although most of the projects and assignments I was tasked to do—data analysis, data presentation, editing, meetings, research, and office organization— I did not find enjoyable, they did teach me useful new skills. I am now proficient in Excel and data analysis as well as organizing projects and events with schools and educators. I wish I had been able to do more work off the computer and more direct work with people impacted by the organization. It was wonderful to be able to put the theoretical skills I acquired at St. John’s into practical use. Not only did I learn new ways to present my work, but I had to do so at a fast and unpredictable pace. This helped me learn to be adaptable and humble as well as to ask for guidance when I needed it. The highlight of my internship was being able to run a discussion with students at Washington Latin Public Charter School. Nothing can compare to the experience of seeing children excited and curious about learning. This opportunity made me think more concretely about my goal in my career: helping people. After being asked by the Director of Literacy if I was considering being a teacher, I thought maybe I will be able to achieve this goal through the classroom. My main worry from this summer is that I am extraordinarily bad at committing to tasks I don’t enjoy. This is a problem because in life there are many things we must do even if we don’t want to. I hope I can take this realization and challenge it through discipline and hard work.

Bennett Scott ‘24

Christine Kng (with DNV Netherlands Energy Systems) Leiden/Den Haag, The Netherlands My internship with Christine was as a research assistant helping with her work in energy and energy infrastructure in Southeast Asia. My work consisted mostly of reading technical, government, news, and other documents and extracting the most important pieces and compiling them in either a presentation or document. I also worked bringing various data sets together to create a more complete idea of the available information (for example: finding all of the statements that a company has made about its projected energy capabilities for different coming years and making a cohesive timeline). This work was focused on two major projects: hydrogen in Sarawak and energy financing in Laos. Sarawak, the largest state of Malaysia, has a superabundance of energy, particularly hydroelectric dams; the question we were focused on was: how can Sarawak best export their excess produced energy? Because it is on the island of Borneo a fair distance from the mainland of Malaysia, an undersea cable would be extremely expensive. The other option is chemical energy export, often shorthanded by saying ‘hydrogen energy,’ even though that is only one of multiple options. My job was to find how expensive hydrogen export would be, what infrastructure would be necessary, and who might buy it. Laos has a similar situation to Sarawak: it has an abundance of hydroelectric energy and wants to export it. However, two other factors were of major importance: seasonality and financing. Laos’s rivers change in flow drastically from season to season such that they have an extreme abundance of energy during some seasons and need to import energy during others; one of the questions I worked on was what type of long-term energy storage would be most suited to the region. The other concern was financing; EDL is the major stakeholder at three major levels of Laos’ electric grid (they buy, distribute, and sell). The government of Laos has put a large amount of money into EDL, pitching Laos as “the battery of Southeast Asia.” However, World Bank reports in the past two years have found that EDL is not only in extreme debt, they are also locked into contracts that will only make that debt worse over the coming years. A large portion of this debt is publicly backed, meaning that any default will put the burden directly on the government, potentially devastating the economy. My work was to try to figure out what red flags had been missed to result in such dire circumstances being allowed to develop. My work required me to think about the problems from many different sides: political, economic, technical, and energy. This interdisciplinary nature of the work was certainly one of the most enjoyable parts of my job; bringing together different perspectives to create a more holistic image of the problem space was both challenging and exciting because it was often something that very few people had done in relation to these issues. As well, such variation made it such that I never felt like I was dredging on the exact same issues day after day. Certainly, I was out of my element on some of the topics and would have benefited from more support on the learning curve; I lacked clear direction on some of the problems because of this: 55

they were so large and diverse that it was not always clear to me what I was supposed to do. Still, getting to learn every day was always exciting. My mentor, Christine, did help me with this learning curve; we met twice a week for about two hours total to discuss any questions that I had. For me, however, I think getting to go into an inperson work place would have been better for a few reasons. First, having direct access to people who knew the problems better than I did would have allowed me to make progress much faster. As well, having a distinctive place to work would have allowed me to better focus on my goals. Most importantly, however, was the difference I noticed between this and my last internship: while this summer I worked the vast majority of the time on my own, the previous I worked on a team on almost every project and was only on my own about a third of the time. I felt much better in this team dynamic, regardless of being either a leader or follower. Having other people to bounce ideas off of as well as the energy that a team can bring to work would have made a big difference compared to the relative isolation of my work this past summer, both in the quantity of my output and how much I would have enjoyed it. Overall, I very much enjoyed the actual content of the work, not so much as a particular area, but more as something challenging and multi-faceted and would very much enjoy working in research of this sort (interdisciplinary with direct influence on the world’s problems) in the future, but would prefer to do it in a stronger team environment. Taking the research skills I’ve gained this summer along with abilities St. John’s has given me, I hope to pursue similar opportunities for bettering the world through research. For future students who might want to undertake this opportunity with Christine—she has said she would be open to the possibility—I think a few things are essential: clear goals of what they want to gain from the internship, the ability to work on their own for prolonged periods of time, struggling with areas where they do not have knowledge. It, of course, would help to have an interest in this specific area of research, but I think the greatest difficulties of such an endeavor have more to do with character than investment. Based on that, I’d recommend that both the student and the committee consider whether the applicant is ready to be almost entirely selfdriven in a new field and manner of work.

Ali Shawamreh ‘26

Appalachian Progress Fellowship, Rep. Caleb Rudow, Dist. 116, North Carolina House of Representatives Asheville, NC I am deeply grateful for the extraordinary opportunity I experienced this summer through the Appalachian Progress Fellowship. Through the generous funding from the Hodson Trust program, this enriching experience allowed me to immerse myself in the world of local government through an internship with Mr. Caleb Rudow, the representative of North Carolina's House District 116. The program was thoughtfully designed in three stages, each unveiling unique aspects of government operations and community engagement. The initial phase of the internship involved an intensive research component. My focus was on investigating programs related to environmental sustainability, energy efficiency, and healthcare access. I closely examined the tax credits and deductions available through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which serve as incentives for individuals and businesses to invest in clean energy resources. Simultaneously, I delved into the intricate landscape of healthcare services, particularly Medicaid, community health services via Western North Carolina Health and Human Services (WNCCHS) and the Minnie Jones Health Center. I also explored the outreach efforts of food stamp services and the Double Up Food Bucks program, enriching local farmers' markets for constituents. Additionally, I delved into resources dedicated to addressing chronic diseases or injuries. This comprehensive analysis allowed me to grasp the multifaceted nature of services offered across county, state, and federal levels, as well as the complex interplay between them. The subsequent weeks were dedicated to community outreach, an experience that underscored the importance of forging authentic connections. Guided by mentors from the community, I engaged in door-to-door canvassing, distributing well-crafted informative materials. This encompassed providing constituents with comprehensive details about services uncovered during our research. We also had residents of the district fill out surveys to gauge their feelings on the relative importance of different government policies, including programs for climate change, anti-poverty measures, early childhood education, etc. Additionally, I had the privilege of participating in phone banking for the N.C. Treasury Department's unclaimed property fund, a service aimed at reuniting residents with their lost assets. Beyond serving constituents, our team engaged with local elected officials including Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, Buncombe County Commissioner Terri Wells, Buncombe County Register of Deeds Drew Reisinger, and N.C. Governor Roy Cooper. These meetings offered unique insights into their roles and perspectives. Additionally, I benefited from guest speaker presentations covering subjects like election services, lobbying, and legislative support. Participating in community events and learning from these speakers deepened my understanding of local issues. The final phase of the internship centered on composing opinion pieces for local newspapers. These articles were crafted to capture the essence of our summer experience while illuminating the array of services available to constituents. In one piece, I delved into the intricacies of our 57

work and the services themselves, aiming to offer readers a comprehensive understanding of our efforts. The other article focused on exploring the "last mile problem," a challenge where eligible individuals fail to access available government programs due to lack of awareness or barriers in the signup process. This piece also delved into potential solutions through the integration of service automation. My honed essay writing skills, cultivated at St. John's College, played a pivotal role in presenting these insights coherently and engagingly to a broader audience. What added a distinctive dimension to the internship were the mentors who guided me in specific domains. For the investigation of energy efficiency and environmental sustainability services, I had the privilege of working with Mr. Ken Brame. He is a dedicated volunteer leader with the western North Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club, an influential environmental organization. His insights and expertise enriched my understanding of how advocacy and grassroots initiatives shape sustainable practices in our community. When delving into healthcare access, I had the privilege of engaging with Mr. Shuchin Shukla. His affiliation with the non-profit Mountain Area Health and Education Center (MAHEC) provided a comprehensive perspective on community health services. This experience illuminated the vital role of organizations like MAHEC in bridging healthcare gaps for underserved communities. While the internship presented various challenges, these situations fostered an invaluable learning curve in adapting to fluctuating work dynamics. The growth I experienced in this aspect holds profound significance as I reshape my career aspirations. Although my career trajectory has evolved, moving away from direct government roles, my dedication to making a meaningful impact remains unwavering. I envision contributing to non-profit organizations that channel federal funding into efficiently providing and coordinating essential services. Overall, my time with the Appalachian Progress Fellowship has been a fantastic blend of learning, engagement, and personal development. Through this experience, I've gained insights into the intricacies of local government and the importance of forging genuine connections within our community. Armed with this newfound knowledge and the skills I've honed, I'm excited to step into the ever-evolving landscape and make a meaningful impact. This internship has ignited a drive within me, fueling my commitment to effecting positive change in the lives of those around me.

Lirian Selene Spolaore ‘23 SuzeMuze Studio Annapolis, MD

Hosted by alumnus Susan Gabriel (SF22) Lirian, on the left, with her mentor.

During my internship with the SuzeMuze Studio, I had the opportunity to serve as a Social Media Advisor and Web + User Experience Designer. Throughout my tenure, I was actively involved in various tasks, including website design, optimizing user experience, enhancing site visibility, implementing new services, and providing IT support for social media platform projects. As a web designer, my primary focus was on creating an intuitive and visually appealing website interface that enhanced user experience. I worked attentively to understand the target audience and helped design a website that ensured easy navigation, seamless access to information, and an engaging visual presentation. The objective was to create a user-friendly website that reflected the soulful and inspiring essence of SuzeMuze Studio's brand. Then, to increase the website's visibility and reach a broader audience, I utilized effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. I strategically integrated relevant meta tag lines, SEO descriptions, and keywords throughout the website's content. By optimizing the site's structure and content, we significantly improved its search engine ranking, driving more organic traffic and enhancing online discoverability. I also worked on incorporating interactive elements and user-friendly features. This included integrating multimedia content, adding visual galleries, and implementing easy-to-use navigation menus, like adding a search bar and changing the way the navigation bar was structured to increase usability. By offering a seamless and engaging browsing experience, we aimed to increase user engagement and encourage visitors to explore more of SuzeMuze Studio's offerings. Additionally, during my internship, SuzeMuze Studio decided to redesign its service offerings and how the offerings were displayed on the site. I was actively involved in the implementation of these new services on the website. This involved creating dedicated pages, designing servicespecific content, and integrating relevant booking and scheduling functionalities. The objective was to provide visitors with clear and accessible information about the newly introduced services. This allows visitors to book appointments, access exclusive content, and engage with SuzeMuze Studio's community easily. By creating a seamless user portal, we aimed to foster a stronger sense of connection and engagement with the audience. As part of the social media advisory role, I assisted in various platform projects. This included optimizing content for different platforms, creating a new logo brand and choosing online distributors. I also provided IT support for promotional activities, ensuring smooth execution of events, product launches, and news updates across social media channels. In addition to web design and social media management, I integrated a scheduling event and portal user functionality into the website. My internship experience at SuzeMuze Studio was incredibly rewarding. By contributing to the enhancement of user experience, increasing site visibility, and supporting the growth of the brand's digital presence, I played a key role in creating a more engaging and accessible platform for SuzeMuze Studio. The skills and knowledge I gained during this internship will undoubtedly be valuable in my future career endeavors within the realm of User Experience and Web Design, both of which need to understand social medias and how they shape life on the internet. 59