internships

It’s not dirt, it’s SOIL: Reflections from a K summer internship

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Monica Cooper ′14says she is “really excited about pursuing a masters and/or Ph.D. after I graduate.”

Monica Cooper ′14 in a lab
Monica Cooper ′14 prepares a 96 well micro plate in Dr. Sarah Emery’s lab at the University of Louisville. Photo credit: Phung Nguyen.

A big reason for her enthusiasm is taking place right now–her summer internship working on the Kellogg Biological Station Long-term Ecological Research experiment, or KBS LTER, part of Michigan State University’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, funded by the National Science Foundation.

The KBS is located in Hickory Corners, Mich., not far from Kalamazoo. Monica, a biology major who completed her K study abroad in Quito, Ecuador, is working with KBS LTER scientists at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where she studies “a pesky little protein,” goes “botanizing” in local parks, and explores the Red River Gorge.

“I hope to be a community level ecologist, and never really pictured myself in a lab, indoors, for a whole summer,” wrote Monica in a recent blog post about her summer internship. “Through this REU, I have learned an incredible amount about soil ecology, botany, and what research really is.”

“Monica wrote a terrific blog about her research experience,” wrote MSU Agriculture & Ecology Education & Outreach Specialist Julie Doll, Ph.D., in an email. “We are pleased to work with her and hope to work with other Kalamazoo College students in the future.”

Read Monica′s blog post here.

Freshly Filtered Fertilizer

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Samantha Jolly ’15 is building a bike that will help save the world.

As you know, the Kalamazoo College campus is covered with gardens large and small. But did you know that the College produces some its very own compost to fertilize these gardens? It does. And it intends to produce even more this coming year with help from Jolly’s bike.

Compost Intern Sammy Jolly works toward creating a bicycle
Compost Intern Sammy Jolly with the beginnings of the bike.

Jolly and other Student Compost Interns in the K Recycling Department collect food waste from the Living Learning Houses and elsewhere on campus each week and place it in compost bins located in The Grove behind DeWaters and Trowbridge Residence Halls. Last year’s pilot project turned about 3,000 pounds of food waste into composted soil that helps fertilize garden beds across campus.

Mother nature controls much of the composting process, but Jolly and her fellow interns speed that process by regularly turning  compost in the bins with pitchforks and shovels. They also filter out the final product (dirt, essentially) from the active material by shaking it all through hand-held screens.

Here’s where the world-saving bike comes in. Working from her own design and with help from K Recycling Director Rob Townsend, Jolly is building a stationary bike to help separate the finely composted soil from larger chunks. Instead of a rear wheel, her bike features a cylinder made of chicken wire stretched around old bike wheel rims. A bike chain connects the cylinder, which straddles the legs of an old College bunk bed, to the bike gears.

Students shovel compost into the cylinder, jump on the bike seat, and pedal. The chain turns the cylinder, which churns the compost. A wheelbarrow strategically placed under the cylinder catches the fine freshly filtered fertilizer.

Thereby saving the world. Or at least one small corner of it in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

“It′s been really fun trying to find things to recycle and turn into this sifter. It′s like one giant recycling project. I have to build a machine out of recycled parts to help recycle our food waste!” said Jolly.

K-Plan Cultivation

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Kalamazoo College students may not be in class during the summer, but they are busy cultivating their K-Plans, across the country and around the world, in externships and internships supported by the Center for Career and Professional Development.

This summer 109 students are taking part in the CCPD’s summer career development programs. The Discovery Externship Program, in its 12th year, offers 46 first-year and sophomore students the opportunity to test the waters of a possible career by living and working with an alumni or parent professional for up to four weeks. Externs and hosts agree that the intensity of sharing both workday and “porchtime” experiences leads to rich relationships and deep discovery about the reality of the working world. This summer discovery externs can be found shadowing alumni in hospitals and health networks, a maritime museum, an organic food truck, dentistry and veterinary practices, financial and consulting firms, a school in India and a farm in Michigan.

To ensure the educational quality of their workplace experience, interns enrolled in the CCPD’s Field Experience Program agree with their supervisor on a learning contract outlining mutual goals and objectives for their summer together. They commit to regular structured reflection about their workplace experience, and they receive evaluation feedback at the conclusion of the internship. This summer, 63 interns are spending at least six weeks working with alumni professionals, Kalamazoo area non-profits, social justice organizations, and a wide range of independently-secured experiences across the country. Most Field Experience Program interns receive a stipend to help defray the costs of their unpaid experiences.

Externships and internships challenge students to apply theoretical learning to practical situations and to examine assumptions about work and careers. One current student mid-way through her internship described her summer work experience as “both gratifying and challenging.” She said, “In many ways this internship is not meeting my expectations and is showing me how off-base those expectations have been. These past three weeks have helped me rid myself of assumptions I held, and have given me new ways of thinking about how work at a non-profit can be done.”

The CCPD is already at work recruiting hosts and supervisors for summer 2014. Alumni and parents interested in offering a workplace experience to a student may contact career@kzoo.edu to request more information about becoming part of the Discovery Externship Program or the Field Experience Program.

Mud for Kids

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Suzanne Curtiss ′14 has been running things at International Child Care (ICC).

Literally, running.

Curtiss is the ICC student intern working out of the Christian health development organization’s headquarters in downtown Kalamazoo this summer. ICC is partnering with the Warrior Dash II mud run in Walker, Mich., near Grand Rapids on an event in September, and Curtiss has been charged with getting the word out. So she laced up her running shoes and has been running the streets of Kalamazoo to deliver news releases to Kalamazoo-area news media, running clubs, and anyone else who will listen.

She encourages everyone to join ICC′s Labou Pou Timoun (Creole for “Mud for Kids”) running event to help raise money for ICC’s childhood poverty and health initiative in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The mud run, held September 21, is a 3.1-mile obstacle course that includes man-made obstacles and “tons of mud,” she says.

Suzanne Curtiss
Susanne Curtiss ’14

Working with ICC on the mud run has been Curtiss′s first real public relations experience and the English major (with a business minor and concentration in media studies) loves it.

“The work that ICC does is really inspiring, and I feel very honored to be able to spend my summer working to promote the organization and its international projects and involvements” said Curtiss.

ICC operates in both the Dominican Republic and Haiti with a children′s hospital and another that serves tuberculosis patients. It’s working to change the conditions of poverty that impact health and well-being in those countries.

Curtiss′s classmate, Zoe Beaudry ’14, also has an internship with ICC and will head to Haiti in August Advertisement for Warrior Dash IIto work at ICC′s Grace Children’s Hospital on art projects with the patients. At the end of her six weeks there, she will compile the projects into a photo book for distribution in Haiti and back in Kalamazoo.

Keep running, Suzanne and Zoe!

Story by Mallory Zink ′15.

K Students Part of Monroe-Brown Foundation Internship Program

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Four Kalamazoo College students will be participating in the Monroe-Brown Foundation’s internship program during the summer of 2013. The group is one of the largest K cohorts ever for this competitive program.

The paid internships are augmented with $5,000 scholarships following successful completion. The Center for Career and Professional Development promotes this program alongside its own Field Experience Program and has been building K students’ participation in both.

This year’s Monroe-Brown internship class from K (and the companies where they will work) are: Cassie Thompson ’14, Abraxas; Mark Ghafari ’14, Eaton Corporation; Giancarlo Anemone ’15, LKF Marketing; and Emerson Talanda-Fisher ’15, Parker Hannifin. Interestingly, three of the four participate in intercollegiate athletics–Ghafari in basketball; Anemone and Talanda-Fisher in soccer.

Carpet Diem

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Alumni David Landskroener and Marianne Stine
David Landskroener ’14, Marianne Stine ’12, and Oscar ’13 getting the red carpet treatment.

David Landskroener ’14 is a self-described “movie junkie.” So when he won two coveted tickets to sit on bleachers alongside the famed red carpet at this year’s Oscar extravaganza in Los Angeles…well, it was a Hollywood ending.

“It was cool to see Anne Hathaway and George Clooney in person,” said David, a double major in Theatre Arts and English who also has a concentration in Media Studies where he’s learning about film.

Even cooler, he said, was when the interviewer in front of him pulled up K alumnus David France ’81 to talk about ‘How to Survive a Plague,’ his Oscar-nominated documentary.”

“He gave an insightful interview and seemed really at ease. It was so awesome to have that K connection on the red carpet, with me, a current student, only thirty feet away. K people are everywhere!”

David made the trip to LA from his home near Minneapolis where he’s been since returning from study abroad in Aberdeen, Scotland. K friend Marianne Stine ’12 joined him in a long security check-in process and a seven-hour wait in the bleachers before the stars came out.

“Luckily we had food and drink provided the entire day, and we got to watch the actual awards ceremonies from the nearby El Capitan Theatre. We both held an actual Oscar, and are those things heavy!”

Prior to his view from the bleachers, David’s most meaningful glimpse into a possible future career came during summer 2012 when he served an externship through the College’s Center for Career and Professional Development at The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, a nonprofit institute that develops new plays and nurtures playwrights. He stayed with Bethany (Kestner) Whitehead ’98 who works at The Playwrights’ Center.

“It was a great opportunity for me to see that a career in that field is possible and how to work towards it. Staying with Bethany and learning about her career was just as rewarding and instructive as working at the Center itself.”

Although he looks forward to being back on campus this spring to continue his classroom and extracurricular studies, David said he also looks forward to returning to the Oscars one day, not for a seat in the bleachers, but for the full red carpet treatment.

“Studying English, theatre, and film myself, I dream of someday walking down that same carpet.”

Kalamazoo College’s Career Center Growing Stronger

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Two new reports recently released by the Center for Career and Professional Development (CCPD) document an increase in student and alumni use of CCPD programs and chart the first post-graduate destinations of the Kalamazoo College class of 2012. The 2012 CCPD Annual Report is the unit’s first. CCPD has conducted “Life After K” surveys since 2009. Highlights of the two reports include the following findings.

Of the reporting 2012 graduates seeking employment, 80 percent had secured it by the end of the calendar year.

Of the reporting 2012 graduates seeking graduate education, 95 percent had secured it by year end.

The CCPD supported 98 students’ career development opportunities in summer 2011, including 30 externships and 68 internships.

Alumni engagement in CCPD programs and services rose by 40 percent in 2011-12.

Membership in the Guilds of Kalamazoo College, as measured by new additions to the group on LinkedIn, grew by 554 individuals, or 42 percent, in 2011-12.

K alumna is both medical student and medical detective

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Medical student Sarah Allexan
Medical student and sleuth, Sarah Allexan ’11

Sarah Allexan ’11 is the lead author of a research paper published in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics that looks into the cause of blindness in Mary Ingalls, older sister of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the popular “Little House” book series.

Ingalls Wilder wrote that Scarlet Fever caused her sister to lose her eyesight. Allexan and her research team determined otherwise. Their findings have attracted a lot of news media attention, including an article in USA Today and an article in the New York Times. Sarah also participated in an interview with WMUK radio (102.1 FM), the NPR affiliate at Western Michigan University.

Originally from Englewood, Colo., while at K, Sarah majored in biology, studied abroad in Ecuador, ran on the Hornet cross country team, and sang in the Limelights student a cappella group. She also served as a bi-lingual tutor for first-graders at a Kalamazoo Public School, and completed both an internship at the Seattle Aquarium and an externship at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital.

Shortly after her K commencement, she took a job as a research assistant at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. While there, she became involved in the Ingalls research project.

“It was fun tracing Laura’s journey and playing medical detective,” Sarah said. “This was my first real exposure to lineal reasoning and prepared me well for medical school.”

Sarah is now enrolled at University of Colorado School of Medicine. “But I bleed ‘Orange and Black!’” she said.

 

K Undergraduate Poet is Up and Going

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Winter term 2013 finds sophomore Kate Belew working as an intern at the Poet’s House in lower Manhattan. Another stop on the creative journey of this English major. As a first-year student Kate received the Nature in Words Fellowship at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute for Environmental Education (Hastings, Mich.).

“It is an extraordinarily competitive fellowship,” says Kate’s mentor and Kalamazoo College’s Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss. “And Kate made the most of the opportunity with her project, ’Voicing the Natural.’” According to Kate, the project sought to speak through the plants and animals she encountered during summer at the institute. “I planned to create the project using persona poems, inspired by Conrad Hilberry’s collection of poems, The Fingernail of Luck,” says Kate. “As I wrote, the project shaped itself into sections, and finally into a collection of poems that I named But That Was In A Different Life.” The poems are threaded together by Wild Woman, a voice of nature within a female human. Explains Kate: “I walked the trails, read books of poems, took notes, worked with Di, and took the time to witness what was happening in the natural world.”

Kate has also published poems in national magazines: “Prairie” in Outrageous Fortune; “Spoon Out Indigo” in Cliterature (on online magazine founded and edited by K graduate Lynn Brewer ’05); and “Yarrow” in the print magazine Straylight.

Kalamazoo College Guilds Renamed and Expanded

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On the program’s fifth anniversary, the Guilds of Kalamazoo College announced the addition of two new guilds and the re-christening of two others. An open house to celebrate this growth and evolution will occur Wednesday, January 9, from 6 PM to 8 PM in the Center for Career and Professional Development resource room on the first floor of Dewing Hall. Birthday cake will be served, and attendees will get first look at the summer 2013 internship and externship opportunities. The Guilds are active communities of engaged professionals—apprentices and masters—supported by the College’s Center for Career and Professional Development (CCPD). Membership in the Guilds groups on LinkedIn has surpassed 1,500 individuals, including more than 1,000 K alumni. The names of two Guilds have changed—the Justice & Peace Guild becomes the Nonprofit & Public Service Guild, and the Sustainability Guild becomes the Science & Technology Guild. The Nonprofit & Public Service name reflects the life work of the majority of that Guild’s members, allowing apprentices and masters to more easily recognize their career paths within that Guild. The Science & Technology Guild creates a Guild home for a group of students and alumni professionals that until now hadn’t determined where they fit in the Guilds. The two name changes in no way undermine those Guilds’ engagements with matters of peace, justice, and sustainability. Says CCPD director Joan Hawxhurst: “The CCPD remains committed to those core ideals. Working with Guilds members we will bring these topics into conversations across all Guilds.” The new  “all” includes two new entities: the Education Guild and the Arts & Media Guild. The Business Guild, Health Guild, and Law Guild complete the magnificent seven. CCPD will continue to work with the Environmental Studies concentration to co-host the annual Sustainability SIP Symposium, which showcases senior research that aligns with professional pathways in multiple Guilds. And, says Hawxhurst, “We also will continue to partner with the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership to address social justice issues across all the Guilds.”