We know
what you did last summer! Or at least we know what two groups of
enterprising students did. Venturing far beyond La Jolla’s
sunny shores they found themselves at opposite ends of the continent.
A group of actors ended up under
the big skies of Anchorage, Alaska, while a bunch of bioengineers
landed in bustling Boston, all of them applying their education far
from the classroom.
After performing Kenneth Lonergan’s play
This is Our Youth on campus in the spring, theater graduate students
Brian Slaten,
Brad Fleischer and Carmen Gill were ready for more. Stage Left
Productions in Anchorage offered to sponsor their trip to perform
for Alaskan
audiences. The production was a success, prompting the Anchorage
Daily News critic to hail “a level of acting I wish we could
enjoy more often in this town.” Following that run, they
stayed on to perform in a modern adaptation of Othello. Fellow
student Geno
Monteiro joined them to take the title role.
The four of them then
traveled to the Edward Albee Valdez Theater Conference in Valdez,
where they had the opportunity to perform
in new-play workshops with professionals such as Laura Linney and
Chris
Noth.
“
The Valdez experience was great,” Gill says. “It was
exciting for all of us to be acting in a non-academic environment.”
Meanwhile,
across the country in Boston, a company called Abiomed was handing
out its own rave reviews to a group of visitors from
the Jacobs School of Engineering. Abiomed creates sophisticated
products for people in various stages of heart failure. Bioengineering
students Jay
Joseph, Jason Tongbai and Terrance Pong, and computer engineering
student
Andrew Nguyen completed a 10-week summer internship, working to
improve the functionality of the
external “smart” battery that powers AbioCor, the world’s
first fully implantable replacement heart.
According to Joseph,
the team’s appointed leader, the AbioCor project provided
the hands-on experience and responsibility that his previous internships
lacked. “It merged electrical, mechanical, computer and bioengineering,
exposing us to a number of skills outside of our majors—even
things as simple as soldering. We saw firsthand how these different
aspects of engineering are tied together in a real-world setting.”
One
thing that particularly impressed Joseph was the genuine kindness
of the staff. “They made us feel so welcome
and treated us like
regular employees.”
Apparently the good feelings are reciprocal. “They performed
with excellence and exceeded their original team goal on time,” says
Dr. David Lederman, Abiomed’s
CEO. “We hope that some of them will choose to come back
to Abiomed after graduation.”
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