Department of English
Previous Internships
2025 Summer Internships
1) Penn Medicine Listening Lab
Chloe Chang (‘26) spent the summer interning with the Penn Medicine Listening Lab, a storytelling initiative that amplifies the voices of patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals to foster empathy and connection within the healthcare community. During her internship, Chloe transcribed and edited recorded narratives and helped co-facilitate listening sessions alongside Professor Aaron Levy. She was deeply honored to meet and learn from so many of the remarkable individuals who comprise the Penn Medicine community, and to help shape the stories they entrusted to the Lab. One of the most meaningful moments of her experience was playing the final story for a storyteller and witnessing their gratitude and emotion in hearing their story told—an experience that reaffirmed her belief, as an aspiring physician, in the power of listening and narrative to heal.
Lauren Cho (‘26) interned with Trinity Repertory Company, the State Theater of Rhode Island, which creates bold and original productions, serves as a public cultural community hub, offers critical arts education to students, and partners with upcoming artists through Brown University. She rotated through the administrative departments of the non-profit, working in fundraising and development, finance/HR, education, culture, community engagement, marketing, and shadowing Trinity’s Executive Director, Katie Liberman, a Penn English alumna. Trinity is at a thrilling moment: Lauren was grateful to have a front-row seat to the mechanics of the theatre’s ongoing extensive expansion and renovation project and search for a new artistic director. She had the opportunity to support Trinity’s book club run in a partnership with the Providence Public Library, staff-wide events, the devising of a new original youth play, and an opening night and the annual Pell Awards gala honoring Kelli O’Hara and Tina Fey. She’s grateful to the Trinity family for making the experience one she looks back on with deep joy.
Luiza Louback Fontes (‘26) spent this past summer interning at Zeta Charter Schools, founded by Penn alumna Emily Kim, in Uptown Manhattan. As an Academics Intern, Luiza worked on projects related to High School Design Research and High-Quality Curriculum to support Zeta’s launch of its first high school. Her responsibilities included creating curriculum materials, conducting research, and developing data visualizations to inform innovative instructional design. Her favorite part of the experience was getting to know the Zeta community—meeting students, engaging directly with material that impacts children’s education, and building relationships with the dedicated team members working to shape Zeta’s future. By contributing to projects that directly shaped Zeta’s academic programming, Luiza gained valuable experience in educational innovation and curriculum development.
Clarissa Han (‘26) spent the summer interning as a digital storytelling coordinator for Hikma Collective, a company dedicated to bridging the gap between humanists and entrepreneurs, giving voice to academics and freelancers. Hikma brings together writers, researchers, and creatives to foster dialogue and launch businesses. Throughout the summer, she created social media graphics for Hikma’s brand campaigns on Instagram and LinkedIn, and helped coordinate the organization’s week-long Find Your Inner Founder asynchronous online lessons. She also drafted blogs and designed worksheets, collaborating with the team to cultivate a strong and engaged community of humanists.
Jackson Zuercher (C’27) spent the summer interning at MRC Entertainment in Los Angeles, California. MRC is a leading entertainment studio that develops, produces, and finances many iconic TV series and films—Knives Out, Saltburn, Ozark, and countless others. Jackson rotated between the television and film teams, and had the incredible opportunity to learn the inner workings of the entertainment industry by organizing talent spreadsheets and discussing them in meetings with executives, reading dozens of scripts and providing thoughtful coverage, reviewing travel documents and schedules for ongoing foreign productions, overseeing film and TV Business/Legal Affairs talent contracts, researching IP for upcoming projects, and more. Over the course of the summer, the interns worked in teams to put together mock pitch decks for various projects on MRC’s slate, and then presented them skillfully to a packed room of company executives. His favorite part about the experience was building relationships with the amazing MRC community and learning so much more about the world of entertainment.
2024 Summer Internships
Mame Balde (‘25) spent the summer working as a production intern for Full Spectrum Features, a Chicago-based nonprofit committed to increasing diversity in independent film by producing, exhibiting, and supporting the work of women, BIPOC, disabled, and LGBTQIA+ filmmakers. Founded by Penn English alum Eugene Sun Park, FSF seeks to transform the entire media landscape. Mame, a double major in English and Cinema & Media Studies, spent the summer attending production meetings with emerging filmmakers, and provided comprehensive notes and coverage on scripts for both film and television.
2) Critica
Emanuel Barrett (‘25) spent this past summer as a research intern for Critica Science. Founded by Penn alumni Drs. Sara and Jack Gorman, Critica is a non-profit organization dedicated to counteracting scientific misinformation and understanding health science denial. As Critica’s research intern, Emanuel worked alongside Dr. Jack Gorman to build a manuscript titled “Traditional and Novel Features of Community-Oriented Motivational Interviewing.” Throughout the summer, Emanuel reviewed examples of online interventions on TikTok, YouTube, and X (formerly known as Twitter) to exemplify a new version of motivational interviewing (MI) used in online communities (COMI). The goal of this paper is to show how COMI helps inform individuals in the online community to make better informed healthcare decisions. Dr. Gorman and Emanuel, a pre-med student minoring in English, will continue working together to prepare their paper for publication submission.
Mikayla Cassidy (‘24) spent the summer as an intern at Trinity Repertory Company, the State Theater of Rhode Island, which stages nationally recognized theater productions, organizes community engagement programming, manages a professional artistic and resident company, offers graduate training programs in partnership with Brown University, and delivers
arts education programs for students in grades K-12. Mikayla worked directly with Trinity’s Executive Director, Katie Liberman—a fellow Penn English alum. Over the summer, Mikayla developed an in-depth understanding of each of the unique divisions that are necessary for a non-profit theater to operate and thrive and has since entered a Master’s program in Education Policy at the Graduate School of Education at Penn, with the hopes of eventually combining her love for theater and education in her future career.
4) MRC
Mallika Tatavarti (‘25) spent the summer interning at MRC Entertainment in Los Angeles, California. MRC is a leading entertainment studio that develops, produces, and finances many of the world’s most iconic TV series, films, and documentaries, from Knives Out to Ozark. Mallika worked with both the television and film teams, and had the opportunity to learn from executives by covering phones, reading about a million scripts and discussing them with execs, shadowing pitches and table reads, researching talent and IP for upcoming projects, and more. She and the other interns ended their summer by building a full pitch for one of the films on MRC’s slate, and presenting it to company execs! Her favorite part about the experience was getting to know the MRC community and building relationships with the amazing people there.
2023 Summer Internships
Joelye Land was the DEIA Juvenile Literature Collections Intern at Penn Libraries during Summer 2023. While there, she organized a pop-up exhibit called “Queer Joy for All Ages: LGBTQ+ Representation in Picture Books." The event aligned with Pride Month that highlighted some of the books in the DEIA Juvenile Literature Collection. Read Joelye Land's post about the exhibit on the Penn Libraries blog.
2) UPenn Department of English
Allyson Nelson was the Alumni Relations Intern for the Department of English in Summer 2023, helping to comprehensively update our Alumni Mentors Database by making contact with alumni who are willing to serve as mentors in a variety of fields and by assisting in broader efforts to connect the English Department’s current life to the world of our former students.
2017 Summer Internships
1) Judith Creed Homes for Adult Independence
Judith Creed Homes for Adult Independence (JCHAI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people with intellectual disabilities and autism live and work in the community as much like everyone else as possible. Although we are about to celebrate our 30th anniversary, we win awards annually for being one of the most innovative organizations in the country and government agencies from other states are now seeking us out to provide services there. Our website is www.jchai.org and you can learn more about what we do there.
Jeffrey Careyva writes: "I spent a little less than two months working for JCHAI in Bryn Mawr, right outside of Philadelphia. JCHAI offers apartment services, classes and frequent trips to adults of all ages in the organization who live with intellectual disabilities. It was a wonderful opportunity to help set the organization on the right track to increasing their social media presence, improve their website and set up a blog for JCHAI clients to use. But one of my favorite parts of working there was getting involved in the evening classes held for young adults; classes like cooking, programming and 'game night' all serve to teach the young adults in the program basic yet vital life skills and how to socialize within their peer group. We learned how to count money by playing Monopoly, how to program by working with LEGO robots and how to self-advocate through blogs and creative writing. I made a lot of friends there that I'm sad to leave behind so soon, but I plan to return to JCHAI and volunteer a little when the fall semester begins!"
Rising Tide Interactive is a data-driven digital advertising agency with a personal approach and a history of winning results for our clients. Over the past two election cycles, our work has helped Democrats win nine US Senate races and seven gubernatorial elections. We’ve helped win hard-fought ballot initiatives on critical issues like gay marriage and personhood. And we’ve helped raise tens of millions of dollars for campaigns and non-profit organizations.
We work exclusively for political campaigns and non-profit organizations; we have no corporate clients. All of us at Rising Tide Interactive are strongly committed to using our knowledge of the Internet to create positive change – helping candidates and organizations who focus on promoting social justice.
Zoe Albano-Oritt writes: "I had a great experience at Rising Tide Interactive this summer. They taught me the basics very quickly and I was able to get into the swing of things within the first week there. A typical week would involve many different responsibilities, including compiling analytic data reports for both digital advertisements and fundraising emails, creating and managing fundraising pages for clients, drafting email and ad copy, and managing multiple forms of social media for clients as well. For example, I wrote and edited fundraising emails for large-scale fundraising campaigns such as those of Senator Tim Kaine, the Democratic Party of Virginia, and Mayor Nan Whaley, current mayor of Dayton, Ohio and Democratic gubernatorial candidate. I also managed a database of major political campaign disbursements and learned basic HTML and CSS to format fundraising emails before we sent them out to our clients' lists of subscribers, along with CRMs used by political consultants such as ActBlue, Blue State Digital, and NGPVAN, and other applications like Email on Acid. One of the things that struck me the most while I was working for RTI was when I received a finished email that I'd written for Senator Kaine. It was really incredible to see the words that I'd written being used to fundraise for a candidate who I admire, and see how directly I was able to make a difference in this way. Additionally, everyone in the office was very helpful and friendly to me, and I left knowing I'd made connections that would last."