Published Work by BUCH Undergraduate Interns
The BUCH Summer Internships in the Humanities program is designed to provide students with the opportunity to apply the skills they are cultivating in the academy to public-facing institutions and businesses that serve greater Boston. For two undergraduate interns, the very nature of their work was public-facing and highly visible. Interns Danielle Momoh and Charlotte Greenhill both finished their internships at The Boston Globe and the BU School of Public Health Office of Communications with an impressive list of publications to their names.
“At The Boston Globe, I was not tasked with busywork. Instead, I was encouraged to pitch my own ideas for articles and speak out if I thought there were any improvements to be made to the Living/Arts section. I was first asked to create new types of articles that the section could run, researching and coming up with my own ideas of what the readership of The Globe would be interested in,” says Momoh.
During her three-month internship, Momoh experienced a whole series of firsts: covering a film festival, interviewing actors, and publishing a film review. While she describes these first-time experiences as “nerve wracking,” she also makes clear that they helped her “think more critically about [her] own writing and examine different areas of writing” that diverge from the film analysis essays she is used to writing as a Cinema and Media Studies major.
In addition to these shorter pieces, Momoh wrote one longer piece that she spent the full three months working on, “Getting to know Nollywood, Nigeria’s version of Hollywood.” She describes this piece as the article she is “most proud of.” In the article, Momoh, an international student from Nigeria, introduces a Boston area readership to Nollywood films and culture and uses these films as an entryway to reflect poignantly on her complicated relationship with her country of origin: “My experience of Nollywood films is much like my experience of Nigerian culture in general — the connection I feel is tenuous at best. As time passes and my [post-college] future looms closer, the reality that it will not include Nigeria presses on me,” she writes.
At the BU School of Public Health Office of Communications, Charlotte Greenhill worked under Mike Saunders, director of editorial content, and Mallory Bersi of the editorial team, who “shared insights on how to interview, how to build a tight story, and which pitfalls of academic writing I should avoid to be a more effective journalist.”
Her pieces feature two alumnae whose SPH education has prepared them to serve the communities that are dearest to them. Her first assignment was to write a profile on Shenaaz El-Halabi, who reports to Director-General Tedros at the World Health Organization. Greenhill illuminates El-Halabi’s inspiring work in HIV and HPV prevention and treatment in her native Botswana through the guiding principle of “botho,” which, in El-Halabi’s words, “for the Batswana people . . . communicates this humility, this connection with society, this love to make a difference in someone’s life.”
In her second piece, a Q&A with recent alumna Jori Fortson, Greenhill guides readers through the moment Fortson decided to enter the field of public health, to her days as an SPH student, to her current position as a program associate on the Healthy Children and Families theme at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, demonstrating Fortson’s dedication to improving health equity for historically marginalized communities as the common thread that unites these chapters of her life.
Greenhill and Momoh’s experiences are just two examples of how undergraduate internships in the humanities allow student voices to enter public discourse on meaningful topics. The Summer Internships in the Humanities program is possible due to generous support from the Office of the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs, the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, the Anthony & Mary Vigna Summer Internship Fund, an anonymous donor, Burns & Levinson LLP, and, starting in summer 2022, the Demir Sabanci (CAS’93) Experiential Learning in the Humanities Fund.