To Our Readers

Spending the summer in New York City as one of our editorial interns may seem like a vacation for Joanna Stamman, considering what she went through to get here. Stamman, a 1996 graduate of Missouri, financed her college education by simultaneously juggling as many as five jobs at once. One of her first occupations on campus was a two-year stint as CEO of Joanna's House Cleaning Business. During her senior year in Mizzou's journalism program Stamman worked as a bank teller, waitressed in a sports bar, covered the St. Louis Rams, copyedited for the school paper and was a correspondent for The Kansas City Star. "Yeah, I worked my butt off to get through school," says Stamman, a native of Rochester, Minn. "But the clich� turned out to be true: All the different experiences and hard work were worth it. I got my dream job."

Diversity of experience seems to be the common trait of this summer's interns. Joining Stamman in our research department are Shawn Cox of Williamsburg, Va., and L. Jon Wertheim of Bloomington, Ind. Cox, a senior at Virginia, volunteered in the burn unit of Charlottesville's University Medical Center the first semester of his freshman year, before shifting his sights from a career in sports medicine to one in sportswriting. Wertheim, a graduate of Yale and a third-year law student at Penn, spent last summer in Oregon clerking for a Portland law firm. Before that he was a writer and production assistant at ESPN and an assistant editor for Rip City, the Portland Trail Blazers' fan magazine. On draft day in June 1994, he relayed the Blazers' selections to NBA commissioner David Stern. "Every time I had to call in a choice, I was tempted to throw in my best friend's name," says Wertheim. "I resisted. I was happy with my 15 minutes of fame—and didn't mind being one of the first people to know whom the team picked."

The same pattern persists elsewhere on the magazine. Cornell senior Jason Friedman, from Glen Cove, N.Y., who is an intern for SI ONLINE, our magazine in cyberspace, spent last fall as an intern for the ABC-TV show Nightline, helping with the coverage of such events as the Million Man March and the aftermath of the O.J. Simpson trial. Brooklyn's Sarah Margon, a junior at Wesleyan, began working in our photo department after completing a two-week trek across the country in a white station wagon she and her friends dubbed Moby-Dick. News bureau intern and Boston University junior Lauren Lipani, from High Bridge, N.J., was an intern last summer on outrageous radio-show host Don Imus's morning program. "I figure if I can work for Imus, I can work for anyone," says Lipani, who is continuing to work for Imus on a part-time basis during her days off with us. "I guess I'm like a lot of college, students. I'm not sure what I want to do with my life, so I'm trying, all kinds of things to figure it out."