To Our Readers

By Elizabeth Valk Long

As many a college student will attest, a summer internship can amount to little more than making coffee and sorting mail. Not so at TIME. Every year we welcome aspiring young journalists into our corridors and put them right to work on regular assignments. For nine weeks, each of the New York City-based editorial interns is given the duties of a full-time staff member. To be up to such rigorous training, they must bring considerable qualifications to the program -- and this year's crop of nine certainly do. Says Julie Hopson- Pettinelli of Time Inc. Human Resources, who selected them from about 100 applicants: "Their resumes are truly impressive."

Sarah Van Boven, for example, is a senior at Princeton who interned for a semester last year at the Voice of America in London. She has applied her experience reporting for the VOA's international-programming service to the task of writing for the news digest in our Chronicles section.

In the Maps and Charts department, Rhode Island School of Design senior Jason Lee has used his knowledge of computer graphics to create illustrations, including a map of O.J. Simpson's estate. Marisa Campbell, a senior at New York City's Queens College, and Susanne Seinader, a recent graduate of Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto, have researched and collected photographs for the Pictures department. Hakim Fajardo from the University of Vermont and Victor Nunez from Wesleyan University have worked on special projects.

The interns' experiences have cast new light not only on journalism but sometimes on their studies as well. Chitralekha Zutshi, a recent graduate of the College of Wooster in Ohio, and Kanchan Chandra, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Harvard, have been researching, writing and fact checking for TIME International's Milestones section. "In academia facts are subordinate to theory," says Chandra. "But after this, I'll never be able to look at facts the same way."

Stanford senior Romesh Ratnesar earned a place in intern lore by finishing one workday in the Business section at 8 a.m., having spent the previous 22 hours juggling three assignments, including fact checking a late-breaking story about the now defunct CBS-QVC deal. Ratnesar's comment on the episode typifies the enthusiasm that all the interns have injected into our working lives this summer. Says he: "You hardly notice the time."