:: By Mary Ruth Yoe

:: Photography by Dan Dry

In Every Issue ::

Here’s how two undergraduates spent their summer vacation.

Hana Yoo, ’07, and Meredith Meyer, ’06—the smiling young women at center—represent the Magazine’s ninth cohort of summer interns. We began the program in response to Dean of the College John Boyer’s campaign to create more paid-internship opportunities for College undergraduates in summer 1997, and we’re glad we did.

At last count, some 20 students have gone through the Magazine doors, working full time in July, August, and September, and part time during the academic year—except when papers, exams, or study-abroad opportunities pull rank. The basic structure of the internship has remained the same: each spring rising second-, third-, and fourth-years submit applications and writing samples; after interviewing a short list, the associate editors make their selections and plan a summer schedule that mixes a bit of theory with a lot of practice.

Never did the interns get more practice than this past summer. Since July 1, all but one entry on the Magazine’s Web log, UChiBLOGo, has been their work. In search of the news, Hana and Meredith have attended swing-dance lessons at Ida Noyes, a Red v. White Sox game at Comiskey (Chicago lost), a lecture on the Ottoman Empire’s influence on the Renaissance, an Alumni Association outing to a Millennium Park concert, and a Fire Escape Productions filming in Max Palevsky, to name a few. Attending the events was the easy part; writing them up in crisp prose took a bit more work. The interns also were responsible for supplying the accompanying photographs, as well as images for the blog’s “Postcards from the Quads” series.

Not only did they man the blog, but they each wrote articles for this issue’s “Chicago Journal”: Meredith profiles a Hyde Park businesswoman who gets legal advice from a Law School program for local entrepreneurs, while Hana reports on the often forgotten but still necessary work of the Office of the University Ombudsman.

And that’s not all. They ran errands, did archival research, photocopied, rearranged our back-issue files, and wrote up alumni news items. We couldn’t have made it through the summer without them.

New to the masthead
As Meredith and Hana return to class, the Magazine welcomes two new staffers. Associate Editor Lydialyle Gibson arrived in time to contribute to this issue (See “Designed to Impress”). With a bachelor’s from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and a master’s from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, Lydia spent four years as an award-winning writer at the Chicago Journal. In addition to writing features for us, she’ll be editing “Investigations.”

Alumni News Editor Brooke Erin O’Neill, AM’04, came on board one week later. Brooke majored in psychology and English at Georgetown University and is also a graduate of Second City’s Improvisational Comedy Program. She’s been a litigation project assistant, a standardized test (SAT, GRE, LSAT) coach, a research assistant for a U of C psycholinguistics lab, and—most recently—a business analyst for Archstone Consulting.