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12 2013
Outside the Bubble This summer, several Whitman students broke into the professional world as paid or unpaid interns. Read about their new skills and budgeting strategies. Walla Walla, Wash.
Transportation
Rent
Interns combine passion with practical skills
$20
$270
by Serena Runyan
Additional costs $170
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Food $200 The Whitman Internship Grant is represented by the black circle. For Washington, D.C., the grant does not fully cover the cost of living.
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Washington D.C.
$115
Food $100
Rent $915
*Monthly statistics
Grant recipients budget in small, large U.S. cities by Talia Rudee Staff Reporter
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Staff Reporter
his summer, senior Jane Carmody worked 40 hours per week as an unpaid intern at the U.S. House of Representatives. She was one of 109 student recipients of the Whitman Internship Grant (WIG), but because Washington, D.C. is one of the most expensive cities in the country, Carmody relied on budgeting and on her savings account to live comfortably. In 2009 the Student Engagement Center (SEC) began awarding the WIG in order to provide financial support for Whitman students who want to pursue unpaid internship opportunities. Grantees work 20 hours a week for a minimum of 10 weeks and receive $2,400. Because she rented her studio apartment for $915 per month, Carmody relied on the money she had saved during her semester in Philadelphia, Penn., where rent was only $250 per month, to make ends meet. In order to keep costs low, Carmody used different strategies to save money. She kept track of her expenses on her iPhone, and she was sure to buy generic brands and sale items at the grocery store. In addition, D.C. itself had a built-in money saving feature. “There’s a lot of stuff to do in a big city that’s free ... I think I only paid for one museum while I was there,” said Carmody. There were some drawbacks to living in a large city, however. Because the weather in D.C. was fairly hot and humid and because Carmo-
dy worked more than an hour-long walk away from her apartment, transportation costs were unavoidable. Despite the costs, Carmody considers her summer in D.C. a valuable experience professionally and practically. “I definitely know how to live on a budget,” said Carmody, “It’s definitely a skill that is needed in the real world.” On the other side of the country, senior Fernando Medina was a social media intern for the Walla Walla chapter of the Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. At his internship he helped manage social media platforms and did research on databases that might prove helpful to the organization in the future. Although costs in Walla Walla are generally lower than costs in D.C., Medina still held two parttime jobs at the Baker-Ferguson Fitness Center and at the Whitman Institute for Summer Enrichment in addition to his internship so that he could live comfortably and begin to pay back student loans. Like Carmody, he budgeted his money carefully. “Keep a spreadsheet with what you’re spending your money on so that you know whether or not you’re putting anything in the bank or that you’re slowly going down ... instead of eyeballing it a little bit,” said Medina. He is grateful for the financial support from the WIG. “I wouldn’t have been able to do an unpaid internship [without it] ... That would not have been feasible,” he said. For WIG recipients who lived at
home, budgeting wasn’t as imperative. Sophomore Cat Mulanax lived with her parents in the small town of Greenbrae, Calif. as an operating room intern at a private plastic surgery company. Mulanax did not have to pay for housing and food, but the WIG and earnings from her part-time job at a gastroenterology clinic helped her to begin paying off student loan debt. Ultimately, she was pleased with her summer. “The knowledge and the experience I gained is probably not something anyone can get anywhere else, so up-close and personal,” she said. Sophomore Zach Calo was an intern at the Oregon Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization’s New American Youth Opportunity Project. Calo also lived at home with his parents in Portland, Ore. and used the WIG as a cushion for gas money and food. Calo’s internship involved working with high school students in a tutoring environment. “I got to meet a lot of really neat people ... both the people I worked with and the people I tutored with, and I’m happy with the experience,” he said. Interns were pleased to gain professional skills and real-world budgeting skills, regardless of their city of residence. “I was happy with the experience I gained and with the work that I was doing, and happy that I was being paid to do it, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to have an experience like that,” said Medina.
his summer, several environmentally conscious Whitman students flooded the internship scene. Their experiences ranged from collecting data in the field, editing radio advertisements or protesting with united mining workers, but all were able to put their passion and education to the test. Junior environmental studies-geology major Collin Smith was able to spend his time outside working for Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation organization that advocates for grazing reform in national forests. Smith worked in the Utah Forest program under supervisor Mary O’Brien, who inspired him to pursue the internship when he met her on Semester in the West. “Mary is an awesome negotiator and collaborator because conservation in southern Utah is the closest thing to a lost cause, I feel. I really wanted to get a view of how she works,” he said. As an intern, Smith spent plenty of time outside. One of his jobs was measuring beaver dams with his colleagues and compiling data in a computer program to make it more easily accessible. In addition, he counted a lot of grass. “I was doing multiple different things, one of which was vegetation transects, which means going along a 100-meter tape, putting the box down every 10 meters and counting the grass inside the box, moving it again and repeating,” he said. Smith hopes his internship experience gave him some of the tools he needed to be a leader within Whitman’s environmental groups, and most significantly for the divestment campaign. “It’s going to get even bigger this year,” said Smith. “[O’Brien] never takes anything on anybody’s word ... I think that’s something I learned that I can really apply. Show me the studies that back that up, because I can show you three or four that counter that.” Smith’s positive relationship with his supervisor also gave him confidence to continue fighting an uphill battle for a cause he believes in. “One of the things [O’Brien] said to me about the divestment campaign was, ‘you’ll win, because you’re right.’ That concrete affirmation about what I was doing and where I was heading ... It’s a matter of perseverance, really,” said Smith. While Smith worked under the Utah sun, senior environmental humanities major Jenni Doering worked as the communications intern for Wallula Resources, a small nonprofit in northeastern Oregon that focuses on the sustainability of the land and of the jobs within that area. As a communications intern, Doering focused primarily on outreach. She planned events and created different advertisements to spread the word about what the organization had to offer. Though she spent most of her time at the office, Doering occasionally got the opportunity to get out in the community and conduct her own interview project for the organization. “I decided I wanted to interview artists ... on the ways
the Wallowa county landscape inspires their work. I interviewed glassblowers, a potter, a wood carver and also a woman who takes underwater pictures of Salmon,” said Doering. This personal work with members of the small community in which Doering lived was most inspiring for her. “That was one of the big takeaways from this summer, was realizing how passionate a lot of these locals can be about their sense of place – what connects them and what connects other people to the land,” said Doering. “People just have such interesting stories to tell.” Doering hopes to apply her summer to her last year at Whitman by incorporating her work into her senior thesis. “I would love to tie the experiences I’ve had in, and make more sense of them,” she said. Senior environmental humanities major Ben Ishibashi spent his summer as a Fossil Fellow at Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), which combines environmental activism with social justice. “At the same time that they’re fighting against coal companies they’re also fighting for people whose houses are getting foreclosed,” said Ishibashi. Ishibashi, who is also a part of Whitman’s divestment campaign, hoped to gain experience with direct action when he accepted this internship. One of his fondest memories was scaring off the CEO of America’s largest coal company with giant puppets. “His security staff was like, ‘These radicals are coming, it might be dangerous, you should probably stay away for the weekend.’ We really just had a bunch of puppets and stayed across the street,” he said. Ishibashi did everything from protesting with thousands of miners to getting wage compensation for cheated employees of an environmental organization. He believes the interpersonal work helped him to be more assertive about the message he was trying to make. “One of the hardest things that I wasn’t expecting was having to interrupt people while they were working. [But] if you’re passionate enough and believe enough in what you’re talking about, people will take the second it takes to listen to you,” he said. All three of these students’ experiences with environmental organizations gave them clearer insight into what they hope to do post-graduation. “I want to look in to radio journalism or radio storytelling,” said Doering. “It was very calming for me as a senior to realize I’m not as scatterbrained and unsure of what I want to do as I thought I was.” Smith sees himself pursuing the sort of work his supervisor currently does, but not until after he spends a little more time outside. “I don’t think I want to do field work my whole life, but certainly after I graduate,” said Smith. And Ishibashi’s experience gave him inspiration for the future. “I don’t know if I’ll find another organization like MORE, but it’s definitely what I want to be doing,” he said.