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Last winter, fresh from a semester in France, Sara Feuerstein ’07 (Rochester, N.Y.) headed to Washington, D.C. for a second semester off campus. While there, she did some extensive Internet research, called the French Embassy and asked for an interview. Hired “on the spot,” Feuerstein spent the summer as an intern in the Publications Office of the French Embassy.

Xiaobo Ma ’09 (Chengdu, China) thinks big. Interested in the trend of growing individualism in Chinese college students, the sophomore math and economics major applied for and received an Emerson grant to investigate them, advised by Cheng Li, the William R. Kenan Professor of Government.

Jessica Lewis ’07 (West Rutland, Vt.) started her summer with culture shock. Going directly from a study abroad program in Spain to a high-profile internship in Washington, D.C., Lewis dived straight into serious work experience as a research intern at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Laura Hartz ’07 (Keene, N.H.) doesn’t like the term “foodie” but she admits that she probably is one. Last February, Hartz took the next step by applying for an Emerson grant, which she subsequently received, to explore the local food culture and agricultural community of Ithaca, N.Y., and the Finger Lakes region.

Hamilton has had a number of fellowship or research students abroad this summer, in locations from Japan to Iceland. Riada Asimovic ’07 (Sarajevo, Bosnia/Hercegovina) is one of these globetrotting researchers. Funded by a Levitt Fellowship, Asimovic spent her summer in the Balkans working on a study titled, “The Future Status of Kosovo: Will the International Community be able to find a Consensus between Albanian Aspirations for Independent and Serbian Determination to Guard Kosovo and its Sovereignty?”

While most people worried about their gas consumption this summer, David Sands ’07 (Bozeman, Mont.) was far more interested in who made the car than how much gas it required. The rising senior had a Levitt Fellowship to investigate the economic differences between China and the U.S. by examining the importation of Chinese cars to America. Advised by the William R. Kenan Professor of Government Cheng Li, Sands worked on a project titled, “Are the Chinese Coming? An Assessment of China’s Attempt to Enter the U.S. Auto Market.”

Alana Pudalov ’08 (Armonk, N.Y.) spent her summer working at the Cornerstone Therapeutic Nursery in White Plains as an intern. While working with the children and shadowing the teachers, Pudalov got a taste of child psychology in a scholastic situation.

Alice Popejoy ’09 (Sacramento, Calif.) has spent her summer researching the welfare state in the early 1900s and the government decision to offer pensions to single or working mothers, a choice she found uncharacteristic for the government. Popejoy described the goal of her project to be, “a full understanding of the cultural context of this movement…I am looking for a story that…will explain the human appeal of these pensions, as well as clarify the cause of change in sentiment among citizens and legislators toward pensions in the early 1900s.”

What do you do with a psychology degree? This was the question that sent Elaine Coggins ’07 (Auburn, Mass.) to an internship in the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University for the summer, where she worked as a lab assistant.

In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marxist critics Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno claim that in capitalist societies, art loses its revolutionary potential and becomes part of a culture industry which propagates the exploitive system that produces it. This summer, Laura Oman ’07 (New Providence, N.J.) used her Emerson grant to investigate whether and how Japanese and Japanese-American women writers resist this drag toward the culture industry.