New Stanley Miller Fellowship

New Stanley Miller Fellowship Inaugurated at the White House

By Ernani J. DeAraujo

Thanks to the generosity of the Stanley Miller Foundation, two Latin School students were afforded the opportunity to serve as White House interns this summer. The new public service opportunities are an extension of the very successful John William Ward Fellowships that have exposed a select group of Latin School students to the workings of state and local government. The White House program is made available to graduates of the Ward Fellowship and of the Latin School. Ward Fellows are required to fill out an extensive application that is produced by the White House Internship Program. They must display their interests in public service, their previous involvement in the community, and their academic commitments. After the applications are submitted, they are reviewed by a committee comprised of Judge Mark Wolf, who serves as Chairman of the Ward program, Mrs. Helaine Miller, the widow of Mr. Stanley Miller, and Ms. Dawn Smalls, a former Ward Fellow who has worked for the Clinton Administration in the Office of Management and Budget, and who served as the coordinator of the interns in Washington, D.C. Two internships are then awarded.

This year the two positions available were in the Office of Public Liaison and in the Vice President’s Office. The White House Internship I received was in Public Liaison under the direction of Mary Beth Cahill, Special Assistant to the President and Director of Public Liaison. I worked in the Ethnic Outreach Desk and served as assistant to Beryl Hall, Associate Director of OPL. Public Liaison is the public face of the Administration and plays the role of mediator between the White House and certain key constituencies. The Ethnic Desk in OPL addresses the concerns of European ethnic groups like Germans, Italians, and Irish, as well as Arab groups. In one event, under the auspices of OPL, a group of teens from Northern Ireland came to the White House, and met with several prominent White House officials, including a member of the National Security Council, and discussed topics like teen violence, education, and, of course, the peace process in Ireland. Events like these are frequently arranged to keep people informed and involved with the Administration’s policies.

The other opportunity was given to Katie Phalan, who was a Ward Fellow in 1995. Katie worked in the Vice President’s office serving the committee on reinventing government. This committee, NPR, is led by the Vice President and seeks to find new ways to streamline government and bring it into the 21^st Century. One of the biggest projects of NPR has been to introduce government to the new technologies that arose in the early 1990s. Now every White House worker uses e-mail as a main source of communication. Recording documents electronically has reduced the massive amounts of paper used every day in the White House. These new technologies have increased the White House’s efficiency and their efficacy in reaching out to the American public.

Overall, the experience for both Katie and me was stupendous. Katie was promptly rehired to work on the Democratic Convention after internship ended. My supervisor Beryl Hall introduced me to her closest contacts in government and business and opened up a world of opportunities for me. But aside from the skills learned and the people met, the most impressive part of the internship was the environment in the White House. Although the White House is not as big as it looks on TV (or on “West Wing”), it is exponentially more impressive in person. It is humbling to think that the seat of our government is in a home that is only as ostentatious and grand as the imagination that beholds it. The White House, though heavily protected, is not marred with armed soldiers on every corner like the palaces of foreign countries. The White House is truly a house of the people.

Katie and I would like to express our deepest gratitude to Mrs. Miller for the opportunity to have these internships. In addition, we would like to thank Judge Wolf for his guidance and Dawn Smalls for her tireless vigilance on behalf of our well-being. The Stanley Miller Fellowships will surely touch the lives of fortunate Latin School students in the future as it has this summer.