Summer a Working Vacation for Many Students

Payne cleans pieces of a Mawsonia Libyca at the fossil prep lab.

Graham Payne ’09 can count the days of his summer vacation on his hands. After spending six weeks practicing geo-mapping in the Wyoming desert, the geology major had a few days at home in Virginia before heading off for a five-week long internship at the National Academy of Sciences Fossil Lab in Philadelphia. “It [was] essentially a full summer work session,” he says.

Payne is not the only Guilford student or recent graduate to cram extra learning time into the summer break. More than half of traditional students do at least one internship, many of them taking place over the summer; other students take on extended community service, study abroad or attend classes at another school. Payne’s geology camp was offered through the University of Wyoming, for example.

Benjamin Dedman ’09 earned six course credits taking part in the International Writers Program in Dublin, Ireland, which is sponsored by the University of Arkansas. Dedman, who will be editor-in-chief of The Guilfordian this year, received one of the English department’s Dorothy Gilbert Awards to fund the trip. “This experience, writing my own stories and hanging out with aspiring writers and those who lived to see the other side, has made my ambition no longer just a dream, but a tangible, though distant, goal,” he says.

Several students worked with the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program: Jennifer Abelin ’09 worked with the University of Kentucky’s Center of Membrane Science); Marvin Morales ’10 studied tropical biology in Costa Rica as part of Duke University’s Organization for Tropical Studies; Abigail Porter ’09 traveled to China to study marine science and engineering; and Ryan Vary ’09 worked with Georgetown University’s chemistry department.

Elsewhere in the science arena, Seth Congdon ’09 was accepted into the highly competitive Amgen Scholars Undergraduate Research Program, studying neurobiology at the University of Washington. Ashley Campbell ’08 performed biomedical marine research at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, funded by the Link Foundation. Several other students worked in various departments at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Four students – Genoa O’Brien ’08, Pauravi Shippen-How ’10, Cully Salehi ’10 and Kelsey McNicholas ’11 – spent two weeks in July on the annual summer work trip to Israel and Palestine along with Friends Center director Max Carter and trustee Ellen Hamrick ’78. The group volunteered at the Ramallah Friends Schools, Ramallah Friends Meeting and Friends International Center in Ramallah, and traveled to visit the families of several Guilford students living in the area.

Internship coordinator Cheryl Bridges says she encourages students to expand their learning outside the classroom. “It’s a way to test-drive a career to see if they’re really as into it as they believe themselves to be, and also to explore their sense of purpose in the world. We have some students discover that they’re not as interested in [a career] as they thought, and we have students for whom an internship just lights their fire.”