UC Berkeley Web Feature
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Previous Student Journal participants at work in Mexico, Borneo, and India. |
Psyched about your summer plans? Tell us about it — as a Student Journal correspondent
BERKELEY – Every summer, UC Berkeley students disperse across the continents, pouring their energy into field research, internships, volunteer work, athletic training, and other outlets. And for the past three summers, several undergraduate and graduate students have taken online readers along on their travels by posting regular entries and photographs about their experiences for the NewsCenter's Student Journal: Summer Dispatches from the Field.
The NewsCenter is currently looking for four enthusiastic Student Journal writers. If you're excited about what you're doing this summer — whether because it's in a remote country, for a good cause, involves an esoteric subject, or sounds just plain fun — and you want to share it with thousands of interested readers, we'd like to hear from you.
Previous Student Journal participants have aided Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic, researched the endangered marbled murrelet off California's coasts, tasted the life of a U.S. diplomat in Paris, and observed Rwandan courts as they struggle with the country's bloody past. Last summer, Berkeley junior Lindsay James reported from Greece as left fielder for Greece's Olympic softball team, while Ph.D. candidate Elizabeth Havice bumped around Mexico's dusty back roads, e-mailing riveting accounts of ghost towns that run almost entirely on money sent back from migrant workers in America.If you'd like to be a Summer Journal correspondent, send an e-mail to Jeffery Kahn, UC Berkeley Web manager, at jbkahn@berkeley.edu by May 1. Please include:
- Your name, class, and area of study (graduate students are welcome)
- Where you will live and work this summer
- A description of what you'll be doing (tell us if you have a fellowship or stipend, or if this is part of a thesis or honors project)
- 1-2 paragraphs explaining why you are excited about the project
- The name of a faculty or staffperson as a reference who can attest to your writing skills
What's involved
- Participants must be willing to write short "letters home" once or twice a week this summer
- You must have regular access to e-mail
- Preferably, you have a digital camera (a photo's worth 1,000 words, right?)
- Your project spans at least 6 weeks
- You're comfortable expressing yourself: you need to like writing and be willing to work with us to improve readability
Ideally, dispatches will be informal and colorful, almost like e-mails to family and friends, with attention devoted to the project, to your environs, and to your daily life. We will consider groups of students working together as long as one student is willing to be the point person and guarantee that deadlines will be met.
By the end of the school year, we will select four Student Journal participants who will give readers a diverse and stimulating mix of geographic locations, personalities, and projects. Let us hear from you!