Seven students aided in summer endeavors with Class of ’08 gift

Sarah Siegel Staff Writer

It’s a familiar scenario: It’s May, final exams are fast approaching, and you’re trying to decide what to do with the next three months of your life. Your choices are between the amazing but unpaid internship and the soul-sucking yet profitable job that will help you pay off your student loans. How to choose? With the Class of 2008 Student Internship Grant (SIG) Fund, seven students have been able to change the inverse equation between pleasure and profit to score truly amazing jobs for Summer 2007.

The SIG fund began as the Sophomore Class Gift for the Class of 2008. A generous alumnae/i couple, James Rosenwald ’80 and Laura Rosenwald ’81, challenged the Sophomore Class Gift Committee, Ketan Thanki ’08 and Peter Papachronopoulos ’08, to raise $5,000 from students. If the students reached their goal, the alumnae/i would contribute $10,000. By the spring of 2006, after several months of hard work, Thanki and Papachronopoulos reached their goal.

The Class of 2008 SIG Fund Selection Committee, which includes a representative from the Dean of the College, a faculty member, and the steering committee, received more than 60 applications in March. Weighing financial need and the relevance of the internship against students’ personal goals, the Committee awarded grants to seven students: Thanki, Kara Block ’08, Eric Chabot ’08, Kyle Giunta ’08, Carrie Holland ’08, Madeline Robertson-Salt ’08 and Ele Watts ’08. Thanki stepped down from the Committee before applying.

Block, who will use the Grant to conduct neuroscience research at the Center for Brain and Behavior Research at the University of Haifa in Israel, appreciates the opportunities that the Grant allowed her to pursue. “I’m so excited that I’ll be able to travel,” she said. “I was unable to study abroad, and the SIG fund is really making that possible for me.”

For Robertson-Salt, the Grant presents the opportunity to get away from the clerical work that she’s been doing for the past two summers, which she called “the job from hell.” “I normally pay about half of my tuition with the money I make over the summers,” she said, so the Grant was instrumental in allowing her to accept her “dream job”—an internship at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, where she will work in the education department. There, she will help organize a program through which educators from across the country will be brought to New York City and shown how to teach using the collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum.

Watts will be a wetlands-management intern at the Vashion-Maury Island Land Trust on Puget Sound, Washington, working to restore creek banks so that wild salmon will return to them. While she could have worked at a Botanic Gardens instead, she said that the Grant allowed her to put the theory of her environmental studies classes into practice. “I was thrilled to be selected,” she said. “It gives credibility to what I want to do.”

Thanki will be in India this summer, working in slums with the Alliance of Volunteers for Service and Reform (AVSaR). At present, his job is undefined, but may involve public health education, teaching English, or helping to empower battered women. Thanki is pre-med, and the grant enables him to make contacts in AVSaR, an organization where he might like to work as a doctor after medical school.

The SIG Funds have provided these students with the opportunity to pursue their goals in the way they see fit. Each one expressed gratitude, and the hope that the grants might be made permanent in the future.