Thursday, April 18

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What did you do this summer?

Bear Altemus ’17

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Major: Sociology

Hometown: Kensington, Md.

What did you do over the summer?

So I started out the summer on a 10-day backpacking trip with the National Outdoor Leadership School, in the Cascades. I’m interested in wilderness. It was a leadership training course, so they trained me to go take my friends and family or whoever I want out into the wilderness and safely have a trip out there. And I drove down the West Coast with my friends who I did the trip with, in a rental car, spent two weeks down in San Francisco. And then I spent the rest of the summer at home doing an internship and working out, because I play varsity lacrosse, so I started getting in shape.

What was the internship about?

It was a mid-level lender, so like a shadow bank that does leveraged lending to riskier customers. It was kind of an introduction to finance, [to] see if I liked it.

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Did you like it?

Yeah, I liked parts of it, but I’m not sure what I really want to do with it at this point; definitely not hell-bent on doing it.

NOLS sounds fun.

NOLS was awesome. Definitely would recommend that to anybody who’s interested.

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Asanni York ’17

Major: Wilson School

Certificates: African American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies and American Studies

Hometown: Atlanta, Ga.

What did you do over the summer?

So I went back to Atlanta. I was working as the regional coordinator for this start-up called Block; essentially it works to decrease the rate of joblessness between black college grads and white college grads, because the national average is about five percent for the average — I guess the average for people graduating college — but when you talk about just blacks specifically, it’s 13.1 percent, so [it] essentially works on that by providing black people — or black college grads — with opportunities, things like that. And I also was a research assistant at Georgia State.

How’d you come across those opportunities?

The CEO of the startup actually graduated from Princeton two years ago. We’ve been close friends ever since, and so she needed someone to fill the position, so I told her I’d do it. As far as the research position went, I just reached out to someone at Georgia Tech, actually, and they were like, “We don’t have anything at Georgia Tech, but one of my good friends at Georgia State needs a research assistant, so I could put you in contact with them,” and that’s how that came about.

Seamus Daniels ’16

Major: Wilson School

Hometown: Albany, N.Y.

What did you do this summer?

I interned at a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the Center for International Policy, where I worked with a program known as the Security Assistance Monitor, where I tracked U.S. military aid to the Middle East.

How did you get that opportunity?

It was just something I found. I’m a Woody Woo major, with a certificate in Near Eastern Studies, so I was really just looking for something with security and the Middle East, and it was perfect — yeah, that’s what I was going for.

Did you have a good time?

I had a great time. Yeah, it’s really informative for my thesis, which is on U.S. military aid to Egypt.

Frances Steere ’16

Major: Architecture

Hometown: Johannesburg, South Africa

What did you do this summer?

I was sent by my department to do research in Japan. I was in Tokyo for a week and a half, two weeks, and then I went home for a significant portion, where I did senior thesis — in parentheses.

What was your research on?

Senior thesis research, or the research in Japan?

Both.

In Japan, it was mostly on Metabolist and post-Metabolist architects, which is their version of postmodernist architecture. We were interviewing now old and decrepit architects. So that’s what that was about. And my senior thesis is — oh, you should tell me what my senior thesis is about. So, two topics, one that’s very theoretical, and maybe I’ll focus on my second, which is on development in Africa and certain entrepreneurial models that accentuate — well, that are currently affecting development in Kenya in infrastructure, so their electricity and water in Kenya.

Lavinia Liang ’18

Major: Undeclared

Hometown: Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

What did you do this summer?

I was interning [at] an arts nonprofit called Appel Farm Arts and Music Center. It’s in Elmer, N.J., which is 30 minutes out from Philadelphia, and the reason why I always tell people it’s in Southern Jersey is because it used to be a farm founded by a guy named Appel — so it doesn’t have apples on its farms. And he converted it into a summer arts camp space and a concert venue and place where people from the community come into just do a community-wide art project. And so the summer arts camp was going on while I was there, but I was doing development and marketing work for them, so I learned a lot about how to run a nonprofit, how to do publicity and event-planning, stuff like that.

How did you find this opportunity?

So I actually did this through Millennial TechCorps — I don’t know if you guys got this email from Career Services last year. It’s a pilot program in this area that seeks to link millennials who know how to use technology and are interested in a variety of causes to nonprofits that share their same mission and purpose. It was almost kind of like being recruited. Millennial TechCorps actually had training sessions for us, and we learned about social media usage, general stuff, before we went into our individual organizations. So there was a pilot class of four or five kids all from Princeton.