Rachel Storey ’14 enjoys World in Britain and Preservation Institute programs

Rachel Storey ’14 fulfilled a long-held dream last year. She spent the entire academic year in England as a participant of Randolph’s World in Britain program in Reading, getting an up close view of a culture she had always admired from afar.

Rachel Storey ’14 draws a sketch on Main Street in Nantucket.

After such an exciting experience, she needed something to look forward to upon returning to the United States. She found that in Preservation Institute: Nantucket.

Each summer, one Randolph student gets to participate in this summer program on a historic Massachusetts island thanks to A.J. and Lynn Land ’60, who sponsor the Randolph student’s involvement. Storey applied for the program while she was still in England.

“It combined my two interests in history and sociology,” said Storey, a South Carolina native who is double majoring in those subjects. “It was interesting to see how the island has grown and developed and how societies are able to keep strong what they want to keep strong.”

Nantucket Island is a tourist destination rich in history. The summer Preservation Institute gives students the opportunity to learn about historic preservation while also working on projects that help restore and conserve the island’s important landmarks.

Throughout the eight-week program, Storey listened to lectures by international conservationists. After the lectures, she worked on two projects with other participants. First, they researched and wrote about the history of tourism on Nantucket. “It was a study of how the island went from a humble tourist destination to a wealthy summer resort,” Storey said. “We were looking to see how that came about, how the property values changed over time, and how personal and social values changed over time.”

Racehel Storey ’14 spent the 2012-2013 academic year in England before
returning to the U.S. to participate in Preservation Institute: Nantucket.

They also worked on ideas to promote the Boston-Higginbotham House, a home built by a freed slave on land he purchased before the Revolutionary War and was owned by African American families for two centuries. The Museum of African American History now operates the historic home. “They’ve been interested in finding more ways to attract interest to their site,” Storey said. She helped develop strategies intended to bring more visitors to learn about the history of the home and the accomplished families who lived there.

Academic and research experience were only part of what Storey gained from the summer program. “More than anything, I grew personally from being there,” she said. Storey gained new insights from working with people she did not know, including graduate students and people much older than her who were looking into preservation careers.

“No one is too old, and no one is too young to go out and learn and try something new,” Storey said. “I really enjoyed getting the opportunity to explore a field that I had never really thought of before.”

Lyric Opera Internship gives student experience in nonprofit management and fundraising

This summer, Melissa Halka ’14 seized an opportunity to work in an internationally renowned opera house and also explore the arts and cultural events in Chicago. It has been a fun journey that allowed her to explore her interest in public art and nonprofit management.

“I feel like I’ve learned a lot about myself and what I want to do,” Halka said.

Melissa Halka ’14 poses in front of a collection of shoes used in costumes at the Lyric Opera of
Chicago. Her internship has allowed her to learn many aspects of managing and raising money for
nonprofits and art organizations.

Halka was chosen for the Donald P. Baiocchi Lyric Opera Internship, which alumna Amanda Fox ’67 and her husband, Matthew Fox, sponsor each summer. The 10-week internship allows Randolph students to gain hands-on experience in arts management and nonprofit fundraising.

Halka has been working to support projects organized by the Lyric Opera’s chapters, organizations in the community that help raise money for the opera house. Those projects include Operathon, a radio broadcast that includes opera music and interviews with performers, and Fantasy of the Opera, a winter ball. Her daily tasks have ranged from marketing to public relations to special events and database management.

“The most valuable thing I’ve learned is time management and the importance of a lot of forethought when planning events,” said Halka. “I’ve done events with clubs at the college, but my boss is really good at keeping a calendar in her head. The events I’m working on now aren’t happening until March of next year. That forethought is something I want to apply in my own life as I plan events.”

She added that she has learned many ways to use software such as Microsoft Excel to track information that an arts organization needs to keep up with.

The internship was an incredible opportunity that Halka recommends to other students. “In this internship, you hit the ground running. You really get to know what it’s like to work in an opera company. You figure out how all the pieces fit together into an arts organization.”

“A huge plus is living in Chicago,” she added. “It’s an amazing place to live.”

During the internship, which continues until mid-August, Halka has lived close to Chicago’s Millennium Park, which hosts numerous arts-related events throughout the summer, including music concerts each Monday and movie screenings on Tuesdays. She enjoyed having the opportunity to experience that atmosphere, something she hopes to create in her future career. “I’m really interested in working with public art projects,” she said. “It’s good to have art accessible everywhere.”

Martha's Vineyard Museum internship confirms career choice

Lian Perez ’14 believes that she has discovered her future career through her Randolph College studies. Working as a public relations intern at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum this summer, she has explored that career path and learned more about museum promotion and marketing.

And it’s a perfect fit, she says.

“I’ve always wanted to do something related to art, but I didn’t really want to follow a curatorial route,” said Perez, who is majoring in art history and museum studies. “I love working with artifacts, but I’m more interested in working with people.”

On a trip to New York during her sophomore year, Perez decided to pursue a career in museum marketing and communications. She has been taking many communication studies classes, too, in preparation for that.

“Communicating effectively and putting out the best image of the museum helps the museum to grow,” she said. “If you are a nonprofit museum, you rely on your supporters. They want to see that their donations are being used wisely.”

Last year, she was excited to discover an internship opportunity at the museum of the well-known resort island Martha’s Vineyard. She worked with Maryam Brown ’02, Randolph’s internship coordinator, to perfect her application. An interview over the phone then went very smoothly. “The initial reaction was very positive and I could tell I would be able to work well with them,” she said.

After being selected for the internship, Perez applied for and received a Randolph Innovative Student Experience grant to help cover the costs of moving to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer for the internship.

Perez has been working on a variety of marketing and events tasks, everything from writing a press release to announce an upcoming program to crowd control during an event. This has taught her many aspects of planning and executing educational and fundraising events, lessons she looks forward to applying when she helps raise money and plan for Randolph’s senior dinner dance this year.

But most importantly, this internship has confirmed that she made a good decision to pursue this career. “I go into the internship every day exciting and smiling. Sometimes I don’t want to leave,” she said. “It makes me feel really confident that I’m going to be very happy with my career. A lot of people are unhappy with their employment, so it’s nice to know that I’ll be happy and really enjoy what I’m doing.”

Eighteen weddings in one day? Internship helps student experience wedding planning industry

A few weeks ago, Ashley Fratus ’14  threw 18 weddings in one day.

Fratus is interning at the Mandalay Bay Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada, which hosts more than 1,700 weddings each year. The fast-paced environment is giving her a crash course in the skills that she hoped to build this summer. “I was trying to find a place that would open a lot of doors for me in the future,” Fratus said. “It’s giving me hands-on experience in the exact field that I want to go into eventually.”

Fratus, a business major and psychology minor, hopes to become an event planner specializing in wedding events. “I’ve always been a really organized person, and I just loved to plan everything,” she said. “I also really like to interact with people. Event planning combines both of those things that I love to do. It plays right into the skills that I already have.”

This spring, she was looking for a summer opportunities in Las Vegas, her home city. She contacted Mandalay Bay’s chapel director, who offered her a 10-week position as an assistant to the chapel’s six coordinators.

The experience has allowed Fratus to learn about various wedding traditions, as well as detailed parts of making a wedding go smoothly, such as sending wedding party members down the aisle at exactly the right times. She also has seen the importance of good business management. “Since they have such a high volume, there is a lot of organization and planning that goes into it,” she said. “I’m learning how everything flows together.”

Students enjoy Amazement Square internship

Two Randolph students have enjoyed their summer internship so much that they offered to continue the work as volunteers.

Mai Dam ’15 and Alyssa DeNisco ’14 have spent the summer planning and marketing events for Amazement Square, an interactive children’s museum a few miles from the College. They helped promote weekend educational events as well as the Ugly Bug Ball, a fundraiser in October. Ashleigh Karol, director of marketing, was impressed by their work as well as their requests to continue working even after their internships are done.

Mai Dam ’15, left, and Alyssa DeNisco ’14 meet with Ashleigh Karol to
discuss plans for Amazement Square's fall fundraiser, the Ugly Bug Ball.

“They both have been here through the summer and have fulfilled their credit requirements, but they both want to be here in the fall as volunteers,” Karol said.

The students decided to continue working with Amazement Square so they could see the fruits of the work they completed this summer. “We both are excited by the way Amazement Square does their work,” said Dam, a business major from Vietnam. “We helped plan the Ugly Bug Ball from the start. We don’t want to leave in the middle of the process.”

DeNisco, a communication studies major from New York, added that this internship has taught her a lot about techniques for planning and marketing an event. Staying a few extra months will allow her to see how that process continues up to and after an event.

Part of the students’ internship duties includes social media outreach, including devising, writing, and posting updates on social networks. “We already know a lot about Facebook and Twitter, just from growing up with them,” DeNisco said. “Using them to market is different.”

Amazement Square has offered internships to Randolph students frequently in the past, and one student, Laura Walsh ’15, has worked there as a paid employee since the spring of 2012. The College and the museum recently created a formal partnership that includes an exploration of more internship opportunities. Karol said that having interns and volunteers is vital to the organization, and she hopes the experience will help students launch careers. “I hope they see us as the type of organization they can come back to for references,” she said. “I try to give them as much experience as possible.”

New York internship gives Randolph student advertising experience

More than 10 years ago, Bobby Crosby ’14 went to work with his uncle at a cable TV network in New York City. The fast-paced work environment and the bustling city fascinated him. “I came back and told my mom, I love the big city, and I want to work there someday,” he said.

Crosby is already fulfilling that dream with an advertising sales internship for A+E Networks, the parent company for cable stations such as A&E, Lifetime, and History. For the next several weeks, he will work closely with account executives and support their advertising efforts.

“I really want the hands-on experience that the internship will give me with sales and a better grasp on the entertainment industry,” said Crosby, a business major minoring in sociology and communication studies. “I also want to apply all the information that I’ve learned at Randolph.”

Crosby, one of the captain’s on Randolph’s men’s lacrosse team, has completed internships every summer of his college career. Two years ago, he worked for a commercial real estate agent. Last summer, he interned with a consulting firm in Paris, France. He believes those experiences helped him when he applied for the internship with A+E Networks.

In the first couple of weeks of the internship, Crosby spent most of his time conducting research on new products, programs, and other developments with prospective advertisers. He then shares that research with account executives, which helps them make the case when they meet with the prospective advertisers. “It gives the account executive some more fire power,” Crosby said.

He also has been assigned to create commercial ideas for a new television show that has not been released. When he has time away from the advertising research, he watches the show and studies the demographics of its target audience. This will help him develop ideas for advertisers.

During the 10-week internship, Crosby travels daily from his hometown of Bethel, Connecticut, to New York City—a two-hour train ride. Then the day is full of assignments, but it is worth having the busy summer, he said. “The internship is definitely keeping me busy, but I've already gained an immense amount of knowledge in just this short period of time.”

Sociology student explores archaeology at Civil War site in Lynchburg

Paula Addai ’14 combed her fingers through a large pile of dirt. She pushed smaller pieces of sand and gravel through a mesh screen that was laid across the top of a wheelbarrow and carefully scanned the material for anything that might be interesting. The day before, she found a button and a piece of ceramic.

Another student worker on the archaeological dig shouted, “I found another one!” Everyone gathered to see him pull a minie ball—a Civil War bullet—from the grounds where a historic battle took placesite.

Paula Addai ’14 scrapes through dirt in search of 

These types of discoveries make the tedious excavation, scraping, and sifting worthwhile, Addai said. “I love digging and finding stuff. That satisfaction is really rewarding.”

Addai is participating in an archaeology field school led by Lori Lee, Randolph’s Ainsworth Visiting Professor of American Culture. They are digging to discover artifacts and buried walls at Sandusky, a plantation that Union forces took control of and used as their headquarters while attacking Lynchburg in 1864. Although the Union army had ravaged much of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, they were repulsed by Confederate forces in Lynchburg.

Lee, an anthropologist who specializes in antebellum Virginia plantations, is leading the excavation at Sandusky to help find the footprint of the Civil War-era kitchen that once stood on the property so an accurate reconstruction can take place. Also, the crew is searching for historical artifacts that would otherwise be lost or damaged if the kitchen is rebuilt. They have found minie balls, a pocket watch fob from the early 1900s, harmonica plates, and other items.

Lee is especially interested in finding connections between Sandusky and Poplar Forest, a home built by Thomas Jefferson, because the two plantations were owned by relatives during the Civil War period.

Lori Lee takes a picture of a minie ball uncovered at Sandusky, a house
that served as Union headquarters during the Battle of Lynchburg.

In the first few days of work, the group found a buried brick walkway and also discovered where they think the walls of the kitchen were. They are currently trying to find the foundation. “It was really nice to be able to start to make sense of what has happened out here,” Lee said.

Most of the students on the project are history students from Lynchburg College, which has a partnership with the Historic Sandusky Foundation. Addai, a sociology major at Randolph, also got involved because she wanted to work on an archaeological project and learn about research methods.

Lee said that this internship is a perfect educational opportunity for Addai. “By doing this project, we do historical research, archaeological research, anthropological interpretation, and we use theoretical frameworks,” she said. “Those are research skills that she can carry on through sociology, and you learn them really well when you apply them in a research setting.”

Addai hopes the experience continues to yield artifacts that will allow her to piece together more information and stories about the culture of the people who lived and worked at Sandusky. “Sociology is all about learning about people’s way of life and society,” she said. “I want to find out what society was like here many years ago, especially about the slaves and how they related to the plantation owners.”

Randolph student develops business plan for local food hub

Tu Nguyen ’15 is developing a plan to help grow business for a local nonprofit that grows organic food.

Two days a week, Nguyen bikes about five miles from the Randolph campus to Lynchburg Grows, an urban farm that provides education programs and grows produce to sell in the region. He became acquainted with Lynchburg Grows last semester while taking “Economics of Food and Sustainability,” a class which studies the economic and social factors related to food production and distribution. Impressed by the operation, Nguyen sought an opportunity to work with the organization. “I sent an e-mail to Lynchburg Grows and asked if they had some internships I could do,” he said.

It turned out that there was an opportunity. The nonprofit needs a business plan for establishing a local food hub that would help local farmers sell produce to large customers such as hospitals and schools. “It would be a cross between a farmer’s market and a wholesale distributor,” explained Nate Foust-Meyer, the Lynchburg Grows farm manager and Nguyen’s supervisor. “It’s a model for bringing local farmers together.”

Having Nguyen handle the economic analysis and write the business plan will allow the project to move forward faster while allowing Foust-Meyer and other staff to focus on the farm operations. “It plays to his strengths and what he’s happy doing,” Foust-Meyer said.

Most of Nguyen’s time is spent crunching numbers, such as the cost of growing produce and the wholesale prices that the target market would be willing to pay. But he occasionally takes a break from the business plan to pull weeds and plant seeds in the Lynchburg Grows greenhouses.

Nguyen also is working in another internship, doing marketing work for a local financial planning office which he discovered through Randolph’s Experiential Learning Center. The two internships together are teaching him lessons that he would like to apply someday in a career as a financial advisor. “I am learning how a real business works,” said Nguyen, who is majoring in economics, mathematics, and physics. “This will be a really good experience for me.”