Karen Chu ‘07 was in Vancouver researching the environmental impacts of oil spills when she found herself smack in the middle of one.

En route to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in Valdez, Alaska, Chu had contacted an oil spill response agency in British Columbia. Agency officials told her they were at that very moment cleaning up a spill. Chu rushed to the agency’s facility and watched as rescuers struggled to save birds drenched in oil.

“It was pretty devastating,” says Chu, who watched as “tubes were put down their throats to flush out the oil they’d ingested.”

The 21-year-old Chu isn’t an environmental studies major. She is a studio arts major in USC’s Roski School of Fine Arts whose independent research project had brought her to the Pacific Northwest. The end-result of her research? A series of paintings probing the consequences of U.S. dependence on oil.

Chu had won a 2006 Kathleen Neely Macomber Travel Award, a unique USC Roski prize that sends art students on far-flung adventures. The grants are awarded yearly to candidates who think innovatively about the relevance of their art to broader societal issues. Since the program began in 2005, nine art students have traveled to South Africa, France, England and Fiji, among other destinations, to research topics from public transportation to childhood memory.

Chu drove with a friend from Los Angeles to Valdez, stopping along the way to take photos, videos and interview people working in the oil industry or in spill prevention and response.

Upon her return, she created paintings using the very medium she had chronicled – oils.

One painting, titled “New Carissa,” depicts a shipwreck Chu visited on the beach in Coos Bay, Oregon. A freighter by that name had run aground during a violent storm in 1999. The hull had split apart, dumping 70,000 gallons of fuel into the sea.

Chu also photographed her canvases, cut out label-sized prints and affixed them on petroleum products such as plastic milk containers, a bottle of nail polish remover and plastic jugs of laundry detergent. She painted on two gas tanks, made linoleum prints, stamped petroleum product container lids into ceramic tiles and created a sculptural hanging from petroleum containers.

In February and March, her solo exhibition, “barrels of sea,” was shown at the Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery in Watt Hall.

“This project came out of my love for the environment,” Chu says. “I thought if I’m not aware of all the oil spills that occur, then maybe the general public isn’t either. I want to bring awareness through my painting.”

Growing up near USC and attending neighborhood schools, Raphael Cameron Anderson knew all about limited educational resources.

A natural-born entrepreneur, he started his first philanthropic business at his very own Los Angeles High School: Ralphy’s Food Fundraising helped pay for cherished student events the school otherwise couldn’t afford, like the homecoming game, dance and parade.

Three years after his high school graduation, the USC business major is going global. This summer, Anderson and five graduate students at the USC Marshall School of Business traveled to Botswana to see about helping schools in the southern African nation. When they returned in late June, they produced a first-rate fundraising business plan for the construction and development of two international schools there.

“I want to create change not just in my community, but around the world,” says Anderson. “It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

Amitesh Aggarwal feels the same way. Born and raised in India, the 31-year-old graduate student was part of the Botswana school-financing team.

“Having an MBA, I feel, is a waste unless I can use it to educate someone else less privileged,” Aggarwal says.

Supervised by USC Marshall faculty David Belasco and Lida Jennings, the business students inspected various sites, toured existing schools, even met with the president of Botswana and local government officials. They also visited a day care center for orphans, possible candidates for the future schools.

The proposed schools will include both paying students and ones on scholarship, including orphans – an innovative approach to enrollment in that country.

The USC Marshall students are set to present their formal business plan to the Bishop of Botswana, the Rev. Trevor Mwamba, during his scheduled visit to Los Angeles in the fall. The project is a joint effort between USC Marshall and a nonprofit organization aimed at improving education in Africa, Think Tank Thuto, founded by Annelize Bester ’96, a USC Marshall alumna and 13th-generation South African.

Although the trip marked USC Marshall’s first to Africa, the school has long been the poster child of overseas learning. In 1997, it became the first b-school in the nation to require international experiences for all its MBA students. Today, about 700 graduate students go abroad each year. Overseas travel programs are also available for undergraduates.

“Showing students a video or talking about cases just doesn’t cut it,” says Ravi Kumar, associate dean of international programs. “You have to take them to Shanghai or to São Paulo, to smell it, taste it and feel it, and really experience global business as it works.”

Inside a sunny dining hall, dozens of senior citizens sit at mahogany tables draped in crisp, white tablecloths listening to a voice on the loudspeaker announce the lunch menu.

“Cream of celery soup,” the voice recites. “Waldorf salad and French dip sandwiches . . .”

Irving Simmons, 76, a retired character actor who used to do mayonnaise and wine commercials, sits beside Julie Thomas, his next door neighbor at Kingsley Manor.

At 22, Thomas is an unlikely resident of the Hollywood retirement home, where she and her cat have lived for two years.

Thomas ‘06 is one of three graduate students from the USC Davis School of Gerontology residing at Kingsley Manor – rent free – in exchange for 16 hours of work per week.

In an informal program begun two decades ago, each semester Kingsley Manor provides lodgings to a few students in exchange for working at the front desk, teaching classes in crafts, line dancing and tai chi, and similar duties.

Entrepreneurial students who needed a place to live originally organized the program, says Maria Henke, assistant dean of the gerontology school. But it has evolved into an excellent way for students to get a firsthand look at the very topics they study in school.

“This gives students a practical view of how policies really affect people,” Henke says.

It also gives them a window into a bygone age. Some of Thomas’ friends at Kingsley Manor once had distinguished careers in show business, like 87-year-old Rosalind DeMille, a former dancer and the daughter-in-law of famous filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille.

Thomas and Simmons (she calls him “Uncle Irving”) listen as the voice finishes the announcement.

“There will be crafts at 3 p.m. and at 4 p.m., tai chi with Julie. Tonight’s movie is Blades of Glory. . .”

Simmons grimaces, trying to make out the intercom message. “She can’t read for beans,” he grumbles.

For Thomas, working and living in a retirement home has made her gerontology lessons come to life.

“I really love it,” she says. “I’m very close with my own grandparents, and I enjoy being with the residents.”

So much so that she spent most of her Christmas vacation with residents who didn’t go home to family. She helped trim a tree and sang carols.

“You should have seen her in that dress,” Simmons remembers. “She looked just like Rita Hayworth.”

Days before Michael Tringe traveled to Beijing to make a documentary, he worried whether his subject might be pushing the envelope. The young filmmaker hoped to capture on video candid testimonies by Chinese gays and lesbians.

He knew it would not be easy to pull that off in a Communist state.

“Being gay is very, very taboo in China,” says Tringe, an MFA student at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. “Gay people can lose their flats and their jobs. It’s a touchy subject, and censorship is a huge issue.”

Tringe, 28, and five other USC film students went to China this summer to produce documentaries reflecting life in Beijing. The six-week trip was the second phase of a global exchange program between the cinematic arts school and the Communications University of China in Beijing. Accompanying the students were film school faculty members Lisa Leeman and Johanna Demetrakas, both accomplished filmmakers.

The year before, six students from CUC had traveled to Los Angeles for a five-week USC workshop taught by Mark Jonathan Harris, a three-time Oscar-winning documentarian and Distinguished Professor at the cinematic arts school.

The films from both summer workshops will eventually be broadcast on television in China and the United States. They also will be part of an interactive installation at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing produced by the USC Annenberg Center for Communication’s Labyrinth Project.

“This program is about building relationships between students from two cultures,” says Harris, who co-founded the exchange.

Working in pairs – one USC student and one from CUC – each team produced a documentary about life in Los Angeles. All dealt in some way with issues of race and assimilation.

In Melt Me, recent immigrants revealed thoughts about loneliness and disillusionment. We Believe chronicled the lives of Chinese immigrants who had become born-again Christians. Unsung Hero told the story of Ming Qui, a kung-fu expert from China who moved to Hollywood and became a stunt double.

Graduate student Chera Kee MA ’06, who participated both years, recalls the first gathering of cross-cultural filmmakers. Only a few USC students knew any Chinese, and the CUC students had varying degrees of English fluency.

“The first day everyone was just sitting there very awkwardly,” Kee says.

But friendships soon blossomed. Tom Xia, who speaks Chinese, quickly bonded with Liam Zheng, his filmmaking partner from Beijing. Xia had lived in the People’s Republic as a child, before his family moved to Arcadia, California.

Xia and Zheng’s film, The Elephant in a Pink Tutu, documented the clash between longtime residents of Arcadia and the surge of Asian families moving into middle-income neighborhoods and erecting mansions.

An international relations major in USC College and a film studies minor in the School of Cinematic Arts, Xia says it was interesting to see his hometown from an outsider’s perspective.

Before this summer’s Beijing trip, the exchange program’s other co-founder, Marsha Kinder, gave the American students a rundown of what they could expect.

“Making a film with a Chinese partner is a great opportunity,” said Kinder, who is a University Professor based in the School of Cinematic Arts and international Ph.D. advisor at CUC. “It’ll take flexibility and negotiation.”

Tringe learned this first hand. When he arrived in Beijing, none of the Chinese students were willing to partner with him on his proposed project.

One student explained why: a documentary about gays, Tringe learned, would be viewed as “promotion of AIDS in China.”

Tinge didn’t want to go abroad and offend people. On the other hand, the reason he had decided to become a filmmaker was to “humanize all people in the world.”

In the end, he and his Chinese filmmaking partner decided to focus their documentary on the personal struggles of young professionals in Beijing.

“China is full of contradictions on the gay issue,” Tringe says. “Although it was not possible for me to directly express my perspective on this topic, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to travel to China and represent USC as a filmmaker.”

Last summer, three first-year medical students boarded a plane to Lima, then journeyed by boat and marched deep into the Peruvian Amazon jungle.

There, in a village along the Yaguasyacu River called Brillo Nuevo, they spent five weeks among the Bora tribe, treating coughs, fevers, rashes and “beechos,” the Bora word for parasites.

They helped deliver a healthy baby boy. But the watershed event came when Javier, a teenage villager, was found lying in a hammock close to death. He was shivering under a blanket on a sweltering day, incoherent and glassy-eyed. Malaria?

With no time to confirm their diagnosis with a blood test – the nearest lab was a half-day’s boat ride away – the students treated Javier with Mefloquine. He quickly recovered.

“My interaction with Javier represents the first time I can say with certainty that I saved another person’s life,” says Mike Hemak, who along with Allyson Hoppe and Megan Klenow accompanied neuroradiologist Ed Helmer on the trip to Peru.

“The power of that simple statement extends beyond inspiring me professionally as a future physician,” Hemak reflects. “It strikes to the heart of my convictions in international medicine.”

The Peru experience was part of the Keck School of Medicine of USC’s Career Pathways Program, which lets students actively participate in their area of specialty early in their medical training. The program is funded principally through Keck summer research student fellowships, mostly from the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation.

Hoppe, Hemak and Klenow – who hope to practice medicine in underserved communities – learned about the opportunity when Helmer spoke at a lunch seminar for first-year students organized by Keck School professor Joel Schechter.

A Keck School lecturer in neuroradiology, Helmer has been visiting Brillo Nuevo on his own since 1978, returning most summers to the tropical village nestled under towering, spider monkey-filled trees. Its 300 inhabitants had come to count on him for their basic care.

“I wasn’t sure I would be an asset at all to Dr. Helmer,” Hoppe recalls thinking upon first arriving in the village.

But she experienced a breakthrough when Amalia, an elderly farmworker, sought help for back pain. Hoppe prescribed a muscle cream and tried, without success, to find the right Spanish words to explain how to apply it.

 “So I gave up. And I began to rub the cream on her myself. As I rubbed, I could feel her relax in my hands. I could feel my confidence grow.”

To gain the trust of the villagers, Hoppe realized, she first had to show she cared. “That day was a turning point for me, professionally and personally.”

Hoppe also recalls helping to deliver a baby. She and her classmates were touched when the young mother asked them to name the newborn.

“In that instant,” Hoppe says, “it was clear to me that we’d really impacted the village in a positive way. And here was our chance to leave our mark.”

They named the baby after Helmer’s son, Kenny, but with a Bora twist: They called him Kenito.

Marc Williams was not prepared for the heartbreaking sight of teenage hookers throwing themselves at men in Subic Bay bars and nightclubs.

“When I first saw them, they were so young I was shocked,” Williams recalls. “They were just girls.”

A graduate student at the USC School of Social Work, Williams MSW ’07 is one of two dozen students who traveled to the Philippines last year to study and chronicle human rights violations. He and the other students focused on the feminist viewpoint in social work and its influence in facilitating change.

As part of their research, the graduate students visited a red light district to interview victims of human trafficking, such as under-age sex workers.

Once they realized he was there to help, the girls opened up to Williams. One told him she was attending high school and prostituted to support her family. Another said the bar owner forced her to have sex with men.

“I was there to hear their stories,” Williams says. “But part of our objective in visiting the bars was to show the girls that there’s another way to go.”

Students visited a women’s prison to interview inmates and spent time in an orphanage. They also visited poor communities, where they observed family interactions. They spoke to women rice farmers who are not paid for their work, and dispensed information about domestic abuse.

“The experience made me feel more like a social worker than I ever have before,” says Jollene Levid MSW ’07.

Led by USC clinical social work faculty member Annalisa Enrile, the program, now in its second year, involves collaboration with the University of the Philippines.

“Our students are boundary spanners,” Enrile says. “They’re seeing how social work theory works in real life on a global scale.”

Williams describes his most poignant experience: meeting 14-year-old cousins Kennedy, Joey and Jefferson at the Children’s Rehabilitation Center, a nonprofit agency in Quezon that aids youths orphaned by state military violence.

When Williams first met the boys, they refused to speak. Accused of rebellion, they had been tortured by state military and left deeply traumatized. Williams, who was studying to become a child-advocate social worker, gained their trust by playing basketball with them.

Every time a boy had the ball, he had to answer a question. The queries started off on inconsequential topics – a favorite food or sport. They evolved into more serious questions about what made them sad or angry. Eventually, the boys were discussing the injustice of their torture and life situation.

Williams was particularly distressed to hear Joey’s answer when asked about his future. “I have no more dreams,” Joey had replied.

But under Williams’ sustained attention, the teens appeared to become more optimistic.

“My hope is that we can eventually inspire an international audience to take action,” Williams says, “and create the change that Kennedy, Jefferson, and Joey believe will never happen.”

Melissa was anxiously awaiting her high school prom. She put on her pink chiffon gown, silver heels and felt like a princess.

It was a profound transformation from the baggy gray sweatpants, white T-shirt and tennis shoes she wears daily at the Dorothy F. Kirby Center – the only rehabilitation lockdown facility for juvenile offenders in Los Angeles.

Melissa’s mother, a drug addict who drifts in and out of jail, wasn’t there to help prepare for the big event – a rare occasion when the boys are allowed to interact with the girls. The person who fussed over Melissa’s hair and makeup on prom day was Antonia “Toni” Arenas ’07, a student-volunteer with USC’s Joint Educational Project and Melissa’s mentor.

The volunteer experience was part of a juvenile delinquency course Arenas took with sociology faculty member Karen Sternheimer of USC College.

For the past two years, JEP volunteers have visited the Kirby Center to mentor and tutor some of the 100 boys and girls placed there by the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court. Their crimes range from theft to manslaughter. The kids attend high school on the grounds. Those found to have emotional and behavioral problems receive mental health treatment every weekday.

“At USC, the campus is beautiful and the classroom lessons are great, but it’s almost like we’re trapped in a bubble,” says Arenas, 25. “My experiences at Kirby have been my connection to reality.”

Arenas witnessed a significant improvement in Melissa’s behavior over the months she visited.

No longer does the 18-year-old explode into a rage. She has stopped hurling her mattress against the wall. She doesn’t scream profanities at Kirby staff and her house “sisters.” And she no longer cuts herself when she becomes depressed.

Melissa attributed some of her rage and misery to the feeling that no one cared.

“It took me a while to realize that people do care about me,” says the pretty brunette with bronze-colored eyes. “I’m glad I have someone supporting me. Toni is like my best friend.”

Arenas knows she has made a difference in Melissa’s life. And in her own life, too. Those weekly visits to Kirby inspired the USC senior to pursue a career as a juvenile defense lawyer.

Having earned her bachelor’s degree in May from the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development, she starts a master’s program at UC Berkeley in the fall. Over the summer, she visited Melissa to say goodbye, promising to stay in touch. They hugged and reminisced about the dance, where Melissa had been crowned Prom Queen.

“I’ve come so far,” Melissa says. “I never thought I would come this far.”

What are the properties of a flame in space? Ask Daniel Calvo, a junior majoring in aerospace engineering, and he’ll tell you from personal experience:

It’s like a big, blue blob. Without gravity, heat does not rise, so there are no spikes, peaks or flickers. Nor do low temperatures allow for the orange-yellow hues seen on Earth. So the dome-like flame glows blue.

“Then there are what look like solar flares shooting out of the sides,” Calvo adds. “It looks like jet flames are shooting out of the sides of the spheres.”

He ought to know. In the spring, he and five classmates from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering traveled to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, they donned Army-green flight suits and boarded a modified NASA aircraft. At 35,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, the plane cut huge parabolic loops in the sky.

Inside the plane’s padded interior, the students experienced the weightless, floating sensation of zero-gravity during 30 second intervals of freefall. The aircraft made about 60 such parabolic maneuvers in the course of two days, giving the students 60 chances to test their hypothesis: that a flame would burn faster in a CO2-based atmosphere than in helium or nitrogen.

What difference does it make? A lot to an astronaut trying to put out a fire in orbit.

For the experiment, the students had packed small wax balls into clear plastic boxes containing the different atmospheres. The goal was to get the balls to ignite in zero gravity. Despite a few snags – their igniter was spotty and the nitrogen box broke down – the team determined that the CO2-based atmosphere would indeed produce hotter flames that burned faster.

The conclusion: “Astronauts should not use CO2 fire extinguishers,” Calvo says.

How did this sky-bound experiment materialize?

“I heard about the NASA program that lets students conduct experiments in zero-G and knew it would be a very cool thing to do,” says Calvo, whose burning ambition is to design NASA spacecraft.

At USC, he formed a club – Students for the Exploration and Development of Space – and recruited team members Quinn Freyermuth, Mikaela Blackler, John Duncan, Emily Hedges and Adriel Carreño. They asked faculty physicist Eugene Bickers of USC College to be their advisor on the 43-page NASA proposal and to help them secure funding from the Provost’s Office.

To Duncan, floating in zero gravity felt like a rollercoaster the instant the car drops. Freyermuth compares it to having a chair pulled out from under you – and not falling. Calvo says weightlessness was so comfortable he could have taken a snooze.

When they weren’t working, team members tossed around a USC football.

Best of all, Calvo says, “we got enough data to warrant a trip [back] next year.”

The children assembled at the St. Agnes Parish School church altar can’t keep still. A pony-tailed girl thrusts her hands in her pockets and yawns, while a boy with a cowlick keeps pointing at the potted chrysanthemums.

“Are you ready?” asks Lydia Mulkey, a graduate student in music education. “Come on, show me you can do it. Show me a choir.”

Mulkey is acting choir director at St. Agnes, located a few blocks west of the University Park campus. She is part of the USC Thornton School of Music’s extensive outreach program with local schools. Deborah Rosengaus ‘07, a vocal performance major, assists her.

As elementary, middle and high schools reduce their music instruction, USC Thornton students are stepping in to direct choir and teach children to play instruments from violin to drums.

Each year, more than a hundred USC Thornton students teach and direct roughly 3,500 kids in local schools. All told, the university runs about a dozen community music programs, including the popular JazzReach, which instructs youngsters in instrumental and vocal jazz, then puts on concerts. The programs are funded mainly through USC University Neighborhood Outreach grants.

Back at St. Agnes, accompanist Alan Chan, a USC Thornton doctoral student in composition, sits at the piano. He rolls out the intro to “I Won’t Grow Up,” from Peter Pan.

But Mulkey interrupts him.

“Alan, we have to stop,” she says sadly. “There is no choir here, just lots of individual people wiggling.” She barks out orders: “Hands by your sides! Hands out of pockets! And if it itches...” she prompts.

“... Don’t scratch it!” the third, fourth and fifth graders yell.

Mulkey points to her nose, directing the children to keep their eyes on her. As her hands set the rhythm, Chan takes up the intro again. And after a few attempts, the children really look like a choir. And they sound good.

I don’t want to wear a tie
(I don’t want to wear a tie)
And a serious expression
(And a serious expression)
In the middle of July
(In the middle of July)

“Well done!” Mulkey says. “So much better. So much better. Very, very good job.”

Once Again, Arturo Castaneda was at risk of slipping into a diabetic coma. At 58, Castaneda had gone blind and could no longer check his blood-glucose level to determine when he needed an insulin shot. Homeless and destitute, he couldn’t afford another “talking” diabetes monitor (price tag: $400). The one he’d previously owned had been stolen at a shelter.

Enter Stephanie Iniguez PharmD ’07, a student in USC’s School of Pharmacy. She and several classmates called distributor after distributor until they found one willing to donate a talking monitor.

Iniguez is serving indigent patients at a free clinic on Skid Row, one of eight in L.A.’s poorest neighborhoods where pharmacy residents and students work under the supervision of USC faculty pharmacists. Recently the American Pharmacists Association honored USC with its Pinnacle Award for this outreach effort, designed to help poor patients manage medications for chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension and asthma.

Inside an exam room at the Skid Row clinic, Castaneda cradles the new talking monitor in his palm. He had cried with gratitude the day he received it. Determined to safeguard the life-saving device, he now keeps it in a locker at a transition house.

As the digital numbers on the small iridescent blue screen rise, he hears a robotic female voice announce his blood-glucose level – “one hundred forty-eight” – a little high.

“When was the last time you ate, Mr. Castaneda?” Iniguez asks. The man tells her he is fasting, and he never takes insulin shots during a fast. And why is he fasting?

“I believe in God, and fasting is helping me,” he replies.

Iniguez shoots fellow student-pharmacist Armine Khachatryan PharmD ’07 a sideways glance. The two know the lack of insulin is a danger to Castaneda’s health.

“Here’s the thing,” Iniguez gently tells Castaneda. “I don’t feel comfortable with you fasting. It’s really important that you inject that Lantus (insulin).”

Iniguez calls in her faculty supervisor, USC clinical pharmacist Steven Chen PharmD ’89, who proposes a compromise with the patient. Is Castaneda willing to give himself half the normal amount of insulin when he skips meals and to promise to alert the clinic each time he begins a fast? Castaneda nods, smiles and shakes the pharmacist’s hand.

Working at the Skid Row clinic has helped Iniguez realize that she prefers a fast-paced ambulatory setting to a hospital pharmacy. This fall, she begins her residency in ambulatory care.

She has become passionate about working with the indigent. “They have the same illnesses as anybody else,” she says. “And these patients are extremely grateful.”