The alumni newsletter of Antioch College Fall 2004
The alumni newsletter of Antioch College Fall 2004
Those who truly believe in the philosophy and mission of their life’s work, as so many Antioch College co-op employers do, might find that employing an Antioch student for a term is like an opportunity to mold the next generation in their image. Youth educator Judy Accardi wants the chance to pass on her school’s self-directed education philosophy to a student who might eventually teach. Cell biologist Gary Rudnick ’68 wants to be able to excite a potential young scientist about research on protein transport. Refugee rights worker Andrea Black wants to raise awareness about the immigrant’s plight for the next wave of graduates, whose values and choices will affect those who come to this country next.
Many of those already working in their field know they have some level of responsibility to make sure their objectives continue to be met in the future, and to inspire those who follow with the same amount of conviction and humanity they themselves started out with.The benefits of the co-op experience for students are obvious. Having the opportunity to collaborate with experienced mentors in a professional environment without the full set of qualifications is a luxury Antioch students have always been required to attain. But how can employers, many of whom are small non-profit organizations, afford year after year to devote the time, money and resources necessary to hire a student who has little or no previous experience?
Many employers believe so strongly in the effectiveness of the co-op program that they can’t stop talking about the many partnerships that have allowed them to rekindle a passion in their own organization and its purpose. Many of them know, from the all-consuming way Antioch students engage, that even if they choose other pursuits, students have been changed by their co-op experience. And employers get personal satisfaction by instilling experiential values about educational philosophy, human rights, racism, free speech, self expression and other ideas that students will in turn pass on to others. Co-op employers acknowledge that their interns come to learn. Students come to study the philosophy of the organization, to meet those who provide services and those who use them, and to observe and participate in the daily operations of their chosen business or organization. But Antioch students also bring with them a commitment to the ideals and founding missions of their employers.
Students begin their education at Antioch exploring what it is to serve humanity, to seek to create social justice and equality and to express their individuality. By the time they get to their first co-op site, they already have a fundamental hold on some of the goals that are important to many of their co-op employers. They approach it in theory in class, and co-op gives them a chance to apply it in the field. Play Mountain Place is a preschool and elementary school in Los Angeles where Antioch students have been co-oping since the 1960s. The founders of Play Mountain believe children thrive best by having the freedom to interact in a rich environment and choose their own course based on their individual interests.
Self-motivated learning is one of the founding principles of Antioch College, whose students gravitate toward and respond to an educational philosophy similar to Play Mountain’s. “Antioch students say Play Mountain is like an Antioch for young kids, and we say Antioch is like a Play Mountain for older kids,” Play Mountain director Judy Accardi said.
Students at Play Mountain are encouraged to express their emotions and work out interpersonal conflicts with guidance from their teachers. The liberal aspect of self-expression is familiar to Antioch students, Accardi said. They bring an openness and a genuine interest in the students at Play Mountain that forges a mutual respect between the children and the co-op students.
Antioch interns usually form fast bonds with their students, who gravitate toward them and come to trust them completely. Over the years, Antioch and Play Mountain students have formed many deep and influential relationships that sometimes last long after the co-op students leave. The attachments are real, which makes the emotional learning that occurs between them very powerful, Accardi said.
Many co-op employers find that students with sincere intentions to serve the community are very effective in reaching the people their organizations mean to serve. The Florence Immigration and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona has collaborated with Antioch’s co-op program for over a decade to provide legal and social services for immigrants facing deportation. With just 11 staff members serving over 6,000 people in some way every year, the Florence Project demands a high energy advocate able to work in a deadline oriented office and collaborate with attorneys and social workers on group and individual efforts.
According to Andrea Black, executive director of the organization, co-oping Antioch students have exhibited all these attributes to help them better serve a generally indigent and often invisible population. Interns learn to work in a bilingual environment while they educate immigrants at the Florence and Eloy detention centers about their rights, interview them and prepare them for court hearings, and create outreach opportunities to raise the public's awareness of the challenges newcomers sometimes face when they come to the U.S..
During her co-op last summer, Antioch student Sabrina Hadden ’05 met with detainees to hear the stories of their struggle to get to this country and the disdainful treatment they received when they arrived. She sat down with people one-on-one and listened as they recalled watching their families being murdered or seeing their homes destroyed and fleeing their country for a better life.
Then she talked with them about their current situation, about their car, their job, and their future dreams, she said. Their experiences were more than just stories because they came attached to a living, feeling person she could touch and learn to care about in an instant. Hadden was profoundly affected, even personally changed, she said, by those she met and was glad not to have been distanced from their experiences by reading about it in a book. “It affects you much more personally and offers incentive to examine who you are and what you want to do in the world,” she said. “It makes you set goals from the heart.”
Antioch students do well at the Florence Project because they care about the political history of the issues and like to debate and question the current public policy, Black said. “They’re not nine to five people,” Black said. “They’re passionate, and they really care, which is what our office is about.”
Though co-op students often arrive at their jobs brimming with activist resolve, they often don’t have enough professional experience to begin making a difference right away. Depending on the qualifications or licensing needed to perform certain tasks, some students have to be guided through every step for several weeks before they can actually be of service to the organization.
Antioch alumnus Gary Rudnick ’68 runs the Joan A. Steitz ’63 lab at the Yale
University School of Medicine, where he has hosted Antioch interns for nearly a decade. The difference in the level of sophistication between a college science bench and a professional laboratory is so big that many students don’t know where to begin, he said.
Rudnick’s lab does pharmacology research on how the presence of certain substances affects molecular transport across cell membranes. The research is used to understand how drugs such as anti-depressants and stimulants influence neurotransmitters.
Discoveries made in the Steitz lab have the potential to increase the effectiveness of the many brute force psychological drugs Americans take every day. Though rare, the primary research Antioch co-op students get involved in is sometimes sophisticated enough to be published. But for the most part, the students are there to learn. And Rudnick is glad to be able to give them a glimpse of the day to day workings of a laboratory in the same way he was mentored as an Antioch student in the 60s. Every lab he has ever worked in, he said, consisted of those who were mentors and those getting trained.
“Science is an endeavor we do as a species, like we do in art, music and literature, to explore and try to understand things around us in a different way,” Rudnick said. “The way it’s done is always a collaborative venture; you don’t go off by yourself and do it.” The apprenticeship cycle is a continuum that ensures a new generation of fastidious scientists will continue the work their predecessor started. Mentoring gives Rudnick the personal satisfaction of making a lasting contribution in a way that publishing his own research never could, he said.
Students who co-op at the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a four-channel public access station in New York, demand much the same type of intense orientation and training before they can contribute to the network’s mission to provide a media outlet for the community. Antioch alumnus Ann Theis ’99 coordinates the network’s co-op program. She is involved in training the students in video production and then helping them help the public to use cameras and editing equipment to tell their stories.
Some Antioch students come to the network having only a rudimentary understanding of the video production process, Theis said. But they take production classes to learn technical skills, as well as debate the political issues of the power and influence of the media. Students soon learn to act as community facilitators by helping others check out equipment and aid producers in shooting and editing their pieces. “Students come in knowing very little and in four months are able to produce their own program and go back to Antioch with an amazing amount of skills,” Theis commented. “The practical experience of knowing what it’s like to work in a production studio is invaluable.”
First-year student Sarah Braun ’07 was on co-op this summer at the network, where she was challenged by a steep learning curve. She got there at the beginning of May without a single communications course under her belt and was thrown into the mix helping editors work their pieces, helping the public to access equipment, and squeezing in her own production classes on the side and anywhere she could. She was not just there to learn, she said. Other people were relying on her to get their own projects done. She learned quickly; two months later, she was ready to start producing a piece of her own.
The novelty of a new co-op experience often elicits an excitement to learn and a fresh perspective from students that can be inspiring to the jaded veteran, several co-op employers said. Student enthusiasm also generates ideas, which can sometimes turn into innovative and useful projects for their employers.
At the Florence Project, Hadden focused on development and outreach to bring awareness of asylum-seekers to the larger community. Grant money and private donors are major sources of funding for the project, but people only support what they know and care about. Hadden came up with a way to get peoples’ attention by holding two mass screenings in Tucson and Phoenix of a film about detainees in Arizona. The educational events included an introduction to the Florence Project’s efforts to help immigrants receive fair treatment and due process. Hadden invited other non-profits who work for asylum-seekers, and advertised around cities and university campuses to reach the widest range of likely supporters.
Hadden had over 60 people at each screening with a diverse crowd and felt extremely supported by Florence staff the whole way, she said. “Without a doubt, hands-on learning has such a huge impact,” Hadden said. “I didn’t want to just sit in class and not apply what I was learning. I’ve always had a burning desire to feel I could do things to contribute.”
Antioch students use their individual skills to benefit their co-op employers in creative ways. Four years ago, Antioch student Tony Romeo ’02 fell in love with Play Mountain Place while on co-op there and decided at the end of his term to make a film about the school community. He traveled back to Los Angeles multiple times to film and interview, and the students became so involved in the project that Romeo had them shoot some of the film as well. Play Mountain has been using the film as a strong promotional tool ever since.
“Tony’s experience was extraordinary,” Accardi said. “He was very involved with the students during the project, and the kids felt a very deep part of the project.”
Contributions do not necessarily come in the form of innovations, but can materialize through the patience and tenacity of, say, looking through a microscope. When co-op student Beth Weaver ’98 was working in the Steitz lab in the mid-’90s, Rudnick recalled, she was involved in original research on the effects of amino acid replacement on a protein’s ability to bind to seratonin and cocaine. Weaver’s results, which Rudnick thinks could have been published, formed the lab’s entry into research on mutated forms of transporter proteins and their binding capacities, the subject of many subsequently published research projects which came out of that lab.
Though the benefits of the co-op experience outweigh the difficulties, there are generally some unforeseen hurdles to clear with any employer-employee pairing. The proclivity of many Antioch students in particular to challenge authority and the status quo and to express their individuality can at times conflict with the expectations of the professional world.
Antioch students who choose to co-op at Play Mountain often display a healthy dose of youthful charisma, which can sometimes degenerate into capricious abandon. The very same attribute that Accardi thinks endears her students to Antioch interns and tightens their bond, can sometimes lead to confusing boundaries between minors and adults, or authority figures, she said.
Antioch students respect Play Mountain students and identify with them so powerfully that they occasionally forget that they are partially responsible for the younger students’ safety and well-being, Accardi said. There is only a few years difference between the youngest Antioch students and the oldest Play Mountain students, who tend to be mature because of the self-drive and emotional transparency the program encourages.
Convention is another working world condition that Antioch students have been encouraged to dissect and can have a hard time swallowing. Co-op student Laura Kopp ’07 worked in a law office in Washington, D.C. last spring, where she felt pressure to dress professionally “in a way Antioch students are not always comfortable with,” she wrote in a co-op journal. Though she didn’t like wearing suits, she realized poor representation could land her clients in jail and that it wasn’t “the time or place to fight the fight of why conventional dress is necessary.”
At the Manhattan Network, Sarah Braun found moving from rural Ohio to a Spanish speaking community in Brooklyn was a “huge cultural shock,” she said. Just the fact that Antioch students come to their jobs without much experience means that organizations and businesses have to devote major staff time and resources to train a student who generally won’t be staying for more than 15 weeks. “We put a lot in, but we get a lot in return,” Accardi said of her interns. “It’s a process we love and are committed to.”
With 210 jobs on the co-op list, some of them with organizations that have partnered with Antioch for several decades, the program has to be mutually beneficial. Students get real world experience and ask good questions to continue the intellectual search they start on campus. Employers get to spread their passion with feedback from students that assures them of the importance of their work.
Many employers, some of them alumni, say they love having Antioch students around and wish they could have more of them to get the periodic fix of curiosity and renewed energy students bring. Students can’t help but be affected by their experiences, and they bring that new perspective back to campus or take it onward with them, passing on awareness. “When Antioch students leave here I know they’ve been changed and will take what they’ve learned here with them,” Accardi said.
The benefits of the program go two ways, and at least for employers interviewed for this article, they say they intend to keep Antioch co-op students coming for as long as they can get students to see the purpose in their work.
Corrections:
Gary Rudnick ’68 is a Professor of Pharmacology and runs his own research lab at Yale University. His research is separate from that carried out in the Steitz lab and references in which his work is attributed to the Steitz lab are incorrect. Rudnick is referred to as a cell biologist that studies protein transport, which is inaccurate. He is a biochemist and studies neurotransmitter transport. The research done in his lab has the potential to augment the process of discovery for drugs that treat psychiatric disorders. The statement “brute force psychological drugs” is misquoted. Rudnick actually said that some pharmaceutical companies discover drugs using a brute force approach.
The caption “A co-op student working with Gary Rudnick ’68 at Yale” should read “Leslie Matthewson ’04 working with Gary Rudnick’68 at Yale.”
