Month: September 2012

This summer I had an internship in the music department of a talent agency in Los Angeles. I started out in the electronic department but later joined the music for visual media (MVM) department. The MVM department focuses mainly on finding films/projects for its clients, who are primarily film and television composers and “crossover artists” – touring musicians experimenting in the visual art world. Some of these clients were musicians whose work I greatly admire, making it a very enjoyable experience.

 My day-to-day tasks varied, which kept me happily engaged throughout the 8-week program. The other interns and I were trained on the processes behind booking live shows, documenting ticket sales, and searching/signing new artists, and we sat in on talks about the present & future states of the music industry. (And, of course, there was some of the standard work that goes along with being an intern anywhere.) The people I worked closely with were extremely friendly, intelligent, and creative, and the work environment was always busy but never overly stressful.

My work during the internship frequently prompted me to consider the ever-changing ways in which music is distributed and consumed. How people listen to music, even how they conceptualize the “ownership” of music — i.e., iTunes versus cloud-based programs like Spotify — have been in flux for some time now. The music program at Wesleyan doesn’t focus much on the industry/business side of music, so this internship put a new and different light on what I’ve been studying here. At this point, I don’t yet know what I’ll be doing after graduation, but my experience this summer was nonetheless enlightening and gratifying!

 In February of my sophomore year (2011) I received an email from a web developer at The New York Times. He had found me from his twitter followers and was wondering if I’d be interested in a summer internship within their Interactive News Technology group.  After a few interviews I ended up with the internship that year. This summer I returned, but no longer as an intern. I was hired as an Interactive News Developer to finish and run the project that we had started during my internship: The Times’ London 2012 Olympics website: http://london2012.nytimes.com/.

I worked with the team to create an interactive website that aggregated real-time results, pictures, videos and news from the Olympic Games on an utterly inflexible schedule – the Olympics was starting July 27 whether we were done or not. Along the way I got a real taste for what working in the newsroom is like; I learned how to build and run a website that’s visited by millions of users in multiple languages; and I experienced the difficulty of the work-life balance.

Wesleyan can be stressful, but when my phone buzzes at 3am I am no longer nervous that a New York Times website is broken, and they’re waiting for me to fix it.

The internship that I did is still open to applications until October 27: http://www.nytimes-internship.com/internships/interactive-news,

For the past two summers, I’ve been working with Equality Maine, an anti-LGBT discrimination nonprofit, to bring marriage for same sex couples to Maine in a proactive ballot measure. Our work involved targeting people we predicted would be against us, and trying to connect with them on a personal level and ultimately use that to persuade them to support us.  I got to talk to Mainers who started out all over the spectrum, including strongly opposed.  I found that when I stopped thinking them as potential voters and talked to them just as people, we had much more in common than not.  It will never cease to amaze me how much a perfect stranger will open up and tell you in a 15 minute conversation if you prove that you’re really listening and also willing to share.  At the end of last summer we went into a signature drive, and collected over 105,000 signatures to put “An Act To Allow Marriage Licenses for Same-Sex Couples and Protect Religious Freedom” (a law we drew up) on the ballot for 2012.  It was amazing how people rushed to sign it.  My favorite memory is standing outside our local baseball stadium and having people who were late for the game actually stop and crowd around me to sign.  In an era when people are sick of politics, the support I saw for marriage equality, and for family and friends and neighbors was amazing. 

This summer we moved into campaign mode (Mainers United for Marriage), knowing that it was going to be on the ballot but going about our conversations in the same way, still trying to connect on a personal level and move people’s hearts as well as their minds.  The terrain certainly became more difficult as we came across fewer and fewer people who hadn’t thought about it and just needed to take some time to think about the people they knew, but I got to develop and facilitate some great trainings for our expanding team on how to address concerns while still going for the heart.  The community of canvassers, administrators, and volunteers inspired me every day to keep thinking of the people we talked to not as our opponents, but as people who just needed a little push to think of the right reasons to support us and do so. 

The campaign is now in full swing, and we expect our opponents to come out with some very aggressive advertising that we will need to combat.  It was hard to leave the group behind and come back to school, but in a way I have the best of both worlds, since I will be continuing my work remotely and staying connected.  So this is the part where I ask for your help:  I’m starting a paid satellite phone canvass team here on campus to call Mainers and inoculate them against opponents’ messaging.  I know you’re all busy with being seniors, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience to win marriage equality at the ballot!  So please, tell your friends and get involved!  The best way to reach me is by email at VSwerdlow@YesOn1Maine.org. Trust me when I tell you that this is an exciting time to be part of a wonderful organization working to foster equality.  I couldn’t have been happier working with them this summer, and can’t wait until I graduate and can jump on another exciting campaign!

“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.” This is one of the many mottos Salvadoran people had during their 12-year civil war. More than 75,000 people were murdered, or disappeared and thousands more were exiled, separated from their loved ones, their mother country. I went this summer to “el pulgarcito de america” – El Salvador. With the support of the Davenport Grant, I was able to research how monuments, museums, and memorials represent the victims of the civil war. It was a challenging but wonderful experience.

I arrive at Potonico, a very small and poor town in the department of Chalatenango. There I learned about how this small town was affected by the war while enjoying some tortillas, black beans, hard cheese, Salvadoran cheesecake, and coffee. San Salvador, the capital was my next destination. I went to the Museum of Word and Image where the director of the program was the voice of Radio Venceremos, a famous guerrilla radio station. Then I visited the University of Central America “José Simeón Cañas” where there is a museum dedicated to the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter who were brutally murdered by the Salvadoran Army. After that I visited Monsignor Romero’s crypt, a catholic priest who spoke against the war and was shot by a member of the death squad while he was blessing the Eucharist. All these places hold a terrible story of what Salvadoran people went through during the war. This information made me upset, confused, terrified, and thankful. I felt terrible hearing these events, looking at pictures of atrocious events. I am astounded by the amount of money the U.S. government gave the Salvadoran Army to violate their own people’s rights, however, I am also amazed at the amount of solidarity that the U.S. and other countries gave El Salvador during this very difficult time.

There were many things that I learned during my stay in El Salvador. One was to back up all your information more than once (my photos erased twice).  I learned that the people of El Salvador are resilient. They may have passed through a brutal 12-year civil war and are still living the consequences now (some places extreme poverty and many other departments are plagued by the MS-13 gang). Yet, it is the Salvadoran society that has taken the initiative to create monuments, memorials, and museums to commemorate their victims and through that deliver a message of “NUNCA MAS” – never again will this happen in El Salvador. I look forward to writing my thesis about mis compatriots, mis hermanos.