Davidson Summer Stories

Haas (center in black shirt) and fellow interns get a bird's eye view of Washington from the peak of the Capitol dome while accompanying Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (in front and to Haas's right, wearing white)

by Lyndsey Haas '12

I decided to kick off my post-high school life by working as an intern in the U.S. Capitol for one of my (Alaska's) senators. In the office, I helped to write the "senator's opinion statement" on a portion of her web page, gave tours of the capitol to visiting Alaskans, and ran errands around capitol hill (i.e. got lost in the maze of tunnels and corridors that compose "The Hill").

by Alex Su '11

Despite the fact that I had visited China in a foreign language exchange trip two years ago, I never got used to the long plane ride. After many in-flight movies, two breakfasts, a lunch, and 24 hours later, "Ni hao" (meaning "hello") was the first word I heard once I reached Taiwan this summer. I knew that word ever since I was little. For the first time however, I could say it to everyone I met.

by Becky Whitten '11

I returned yesterday from a week at Lake Champion, a Young Life camp in New York where I was volunteering with the support of Davidson's Staley Grant as a child caregiver during a week of camp for teenage mothers.

The camp was part of YoungLives, a Christian ministry to pregnant and parenting teen girls. My camp was the largest in YoungLives history with about 200 moms, their YoungLives mentors from home, over 100 childcare workers, and 170 babies! In Young Life you often hear people talk about organized chaos, but seeing camp function with 170 babies took "organized" chaos to a whole new level. We laughed during the week about the verse in 2 Corinthians that says, "If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God."