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The issue of human sex trafficking has long been on the radar of international lawmakers and humanitarian organizations, but the recently emerged problem of human labor trafficking is just now beginning to come under national and international scrutiny. Jasmina Hodzic ’13 is interning at the United Nations in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina with the support of a Levitt Center Public Service Grant.

Although Nicholas Yepes ’15 had traveled to Paraguay just three years ago, he was nonetheless surprised by the precarious state of the indigenous migrant population upon his arrival in the capitol city of Asunción this year. He is seeing some of the most economically depressed areas of Paraguay as he studies how best to meet the basic needs of indigenous migrants through a Levitt Research Fellowship.

English major Madison Forsander ’14 originally planned to find a career-related experience in fiction editing, but this summer she instead chose to accept a textbook editing internship at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (CITI) at Columbia University. While the opening was outside of her immediate scope of interest, she applied because she thought it would “be a good way to gain editorial experience and simultaneously expand [her] knowledge of media and communications.”

A picture may be worth 1000 words, but Kathleen Herlihy ’14 is only looking to find a few, albeit in a very literal sense. She is studying the use of sign language in art, a topic which she says has yet to be comprehensively analyzed by any scholarly work. She received an Emerson Foundation Summer Research Grant to pursue an initial scholarly analysis on this subject under the guidance of Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Erich Fox Tree.

Creative writing concentrator Martin Cain’s poetry has already appeared in a number of literary journals, so his award of an Emerson Foundation Summer Research Grant to pursue a study focused on “pastoral” poetry should come as no surprise. Cain ’13 was also the youngest writer to attend Middlebury College’s prestigious Bread Loaf Conference in 2011.

Pauline Wafula ’13 became interested in HIV/AIDS research after writing a paper on anti-retroviral treatments of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa. Wafula, an economics major, has been awarded a Levitt Summer Research Fellowship to pursue further HIV/AIDS research with a focus on women in her native Kenya under the guidance of Associate Professor of Economics Stephen Wu.

Learning English is one of the most daunting tasks for newly arriving immigrants in the United States, and it can be a task that is accompanied by little support. Anna Zahm’13, Grace Parker Zielinski ’14 and Melissa Segura ’14, have spent their summers working to combat this problem by providing much-needed assistance to English language adult students at the Utica access site for the Madison-Oneida Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES).

Julia Williams ’14 accepted an internship at The Irish International Immigrant Center (IIIC) in Boston, Mass. because she hoped to get hands-on experience in the legal field while determining if non-profit work fit her interests.

Although she is just a rising sophomore, Sarah Scalet ’15 is already nearing the completion of two simultaneous summer art internships. She works as both a costume designer for the non-profit Sitar Arts Center’s summer theater camp in Washington, D.C., and an intern at Red Dirt Studios in Mt. Rainer, Md.

Given that both of his parents are practicing attorneys, it’s no wonder that Knute Gailor ’13 has had an interest in law since his childhood. Gailor began his first hands-on exploration of law-related career fields this past year by interning at the Public Integrity Section (PIN) of the Department of Justice while participating in Hamilton’s Washington, D.C. Program. He decided to continue his internship into the summer because he believes that “ensuring that nobody is above the law is … admirable and important work.”