Exploring the World through Internships

Stephanie Fong, Landis Masnor, Zack Fazio, and Renee Meschi are all settling into their jobs as part of the Shimer Internship Program. They continue to keep us updated about their internships on the Shimer blog (blog.shimer.edu).

Stephanie Fong, a soon to be third-year at Shimer, is interning at the Women and Leadership Archives at the Loyola University Chicago’s campus in Rogers Park. Stephanie writes, “Open to the public, the WLA houses collections from regional organizations and individual women alike with a focus on social justice activism, feminist theology, and the records of Mundelein College.” Her job will primarily be to process and manage the WLA’s collection, which will be useful, as she hopes to go into historic preservation after Shimer.

Landis Masnor will also be starting his third year at Shimer this coming school year. Following Shimer’s connection to Haiti through Steve Werlin, Landis chose to go to Haiti for his internship. He is interning, he writes, “with Fonkoze, a successful and growing microfinance organization in Haiti, and CLM, a program of Fonkoze that prepares women who live in extreme poverty for micro financing.”  He is passionate about social justice, making this position a perfect fit.  He is spending the first part of his time in Haiti mastering some of the basics of the organization before he goes on to work with CLM in particular.

Zack Fazio just completed his first year at Shimer. He approaches his internship at the Sergeant at Arms office at City Hall in Chicago with his usual humor. He writes, “The Budget Committee is about to meet, and I have to go practice my yawning with my mouth closed technique. I kid; it should be interesting to see where our tax dollars are going.” He’s spent most of his time at the Legislative Reference Bureau, “reading and summarizing legislation for Alderman Dick Mell’s Legislative Director.” His job may involve the hoops that a government internship normally entails, but Zach writes, “What I do is sit in an office above Lasalle and Washington with the most gorgeous view of Roger Brown's "Daedulus and Icarus" (pictured above).

Renee Meschi, also a soon to be second-year, has a very different view. She is interning at the Mariposario ecotourism bed and breakfast in Montezuma, Costa Rica. She writes that she has always had a dream of opening a similar establishment someday, and what she is hoping to get out of this experience is a dose of reality. This is not to say that she is being discouraged. Rather, she is seeing the amount of work it takes to run a hospitality business. Of course, the challenge of her surroundings is not to be discarded. As a long time Chicago resident, Renee is getting used to being quite so close to nature, and there are plenty of stories about the process in her blog.

Visit blog.shimer.edu for more and continuing information directly from the source.