A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Juan Borras was "surprised by the size of my office and the size of the % operation overall," both of which were far larger than he had imagined. Jin Hee Lee found the working environment "a lot more relaxed than I thought it would be." Brooke Masters was impressed by "how much time is spent checking the facts."

For the past eleven years, Time Inc. has taken on some of the best and the brightest of the nation's college-seniors-to-be and invited them to spend the summer in New York City helping produce our magazines and, we hope, learning about life, work and the real world of journalism. The six interns at TIME in this year's crop are midway through their nine-week stint. If the past is any guide, the summer will be humid with surprises.

"Many of them come from very small towns," says Tricia Rowland, who oversees Time Inc.'s college-intern programs. "By the end of the first few weeks, they realize how much they don't know. By the end of the summer, they think they've got the best experience they could have had."

The TIME interns of 1988 were chosen from 58 finalists nominated by 33 participating schools. Senior Editor Jose Ferrer helped winnow that pool down to the fortunate half a dozen. "We look at how well they think, see and write," says Ferrer. "There's no formal training program. We orient them, explain how we operate and then set them to work." Four of TIME's interns are assigned to various sections of the magazine as reporter-researchers: Borras, who attends the University of Florida, is in World; Princeton's Lee is in the Humanities cluster; Charles Poe of Baylor is in Economy & Business; and Brown's David Gross is working for the International editions. In addition, Harvard's Masters is serving as a correspondent in TIME's New York bureau, and Bruce Strong of the Rochester Institute of Technology is a researcher in the magazine's picture department.

The experience has already proved educational. "I'm seeing how the right mix of text and pictures can have maximum impact on the printed page," observes Strong. For Masters, who is an executive editor of the Harvard Crimson, working in the journalism big leagues has practical advantages. Says she: "It's great to identify yourself as a reporter and have your phone calls put through, which is something that doesn't always happen at a college newspaper." Not even at Harvard.