Jovan Andre Gayle - A chemistry major and pre-med, Jovan has a career intent of practicing medicine in his native Jamaica. His internship will be under the auspices of the Costa Rica Internship Institute where he will be in the province of Cartago working on an Integral Health Assistance team which provides health education and services to low income families. His interest is in gaining "first hand experience in working in programs created for providing basic health services and education, which will also allow me to make formal assessments of the system. By the end of the internship, I hope to have gained a considerable amount of knowledge about health programs in a developing country." In addition to his studies at Wesleyan, Jovan has been a resident advisor, both a lab and teaching assistant, and a tutor in organic chemistry. He has received fellowships for undergraduate research as well as volunteering with the Habitat for Humanity. He is conversant in Spanish and participates in soccer as well as cricket.

Aparna Iyer - Aparna will be staying in Middletown, where she will engage in a project of nutrition education in the City's North End. She will be sponsored by the Middlesex Coalition for Children, specifically Betsy Morgan (perhaps known to some of you as the initiator of most of the highly positive children's programs in the City over the years), and will work as part of the Middletown Hunger Task Force. Aparna will build on things she has been doing in the past year to establish a community-led free summer lunch program for Middletown school-age children, including organizing funding to ensure the program's sustainability. In addition she will add a nutrition education component during the summer project. She hopes to focus her career on education and community work, and is presently an anthropology major at Wesleyan. Although growing up in the up-scale Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, Aparna's resume testifies to a consistent commitment to social action not only while at Wesleyan, but also in her hometown. She has also been a facilitator of diversity workshops and assisting teachers as far back as high school. She is fluent in Spanish.

Jessica Rhodes - Jessica will be working under the banner of the American Red Cross for an organization called the Collin County Children's Advocacy Center which "takes action to identify, protect and improve the lives of abused and neglected children." She will be living at home in a Dallas suburb and will fill the role of community resource liaison assisting social work efforts. As she put it, in selecting her internship, "I was looking for an organization where I could help offer social services to families, specifically women and children, but I also wanted to explore law as a possible career path." She will work with lawyers, nurses, law enforcement agents, psychologists and crisis counselors. Jessica is a student in the College of Letters, is fluent in French, and interned at a law firm the summer before entering Wesleyan. She won an essay contest with a piece on tolerance, and has been active both athletically and in a number of socially responsive volunteer activities throughout her Wesleyan career.

Ruby Stardrum -- Ruby's intent is to go into urban education, in the pursuit of which she spent the present semester in New York City at the Urban Education Semester through Bank Street College, where she was learning and teaching students most of whom are recent immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America. Consistent with that effort, she will spend her summer internship in San Juan, Puerto Rico where she will be the arts and crafts instructor in a summer enrichment program for ages two to ten. As she puts it, "I hope to come away from this summer experience with my appetite whet for further work in public education... I understand that there is an incredible amount of inequity in the American public school system and I intend to begin what I want to make my life's work - ameliorating our capsizing public education system from the inside out." Ruby is an English major at Wesleyan, grew up in Nyack, New York, speaks both Spanish and French, and lists her interests as drama, creative writing, social activism, modern dance and yoga. She has been active tutoring students in Middletown and also in her growing up years in Nyack, has worked as a summer camp counselor, and has been a writing tutor in a Freshman English course at Wesleyan.

Sarah Suzuki - Sarah will be involved with the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center, located on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in Lake Andes, South Dakota. In addition to working at a shelter that houses women threatened by domestic violence, she will write health brochures and reports, publish educational material, and assist in political lobbying by communicating with other Sioux tribal peoples as well as with government representatives. Her interest in this area, as she put it, "goes back to my early adolescence, when I discovered the academic work of my grandfather, Dr. Peter Suzuki - a second generation Japanese American who was interred during WWII and later went on to become a professor interested in ethnic studies." Her grandfather compared the similarities and differences of the government's treatment of interred Japanese Americans with that of Native Americans. Sarah is an English major, has spent a semester abroad at the University of Sydney in Australia, and has done social action work during high school in areas such as a lunch program for the homeless and working with elementary-age children with learning disorders. At Wesleyan, she has been a resident advisor, worked in a publishing internship, been active in the Wesleyan Writers Conference and tutored students in writing. Sarah is proficient in French and grew up in the greater Chicago area.

Some summary observations about our five new "members." As the names indicate, there is considerable diversity - two individuals of color, a Japanese American, and I was not certain of Aparna's ethnicity. Quite obviously, EQV now has its first female "members," and when I mentioned this to the group at our meeting, one of them raised the question whether we were using the term "members" because we wanted to reconstitute the fraternity on the campus. I hastily assured her that was not the case, that we required nothing of them other than their doing good things in the world and sharing those experience and their learnings with us. They are an extremely bright, caring and inspiring group. That alone should be enough to bring you back to campus for Homecoming '06! For me personally, it's been fun being active in this stage of our wonderful endeavor. Thanks to all of you who have supported it, and I hope the initial enthusiasm will continue over our ten-year commitment.