Issue: Spring 2006

Ten Great Student Jobs

Some gigs are so cool, getting paid is a bonus.

By Jeremy Rosenberg

Each semester, some 7,000 Trojans hold down campus jobs. More than a few, admittedly, answer phones and enter computer data. But rumor has it there are some pretty spectacular employment opportunities out there for students, too. USC Trojan Family Magazine sent reporter Jeremy Rosenberg to investigate. From analyzing ancient pottery to planning eco-service missions to running a TV station, here are 10 of the most interesting student-held gigs he found.

1
Spirited Away

Julie Mattson
General Manager
USC Trojan Marching Band

As general manager of the Spirit of Troy, Julie Mattson is trying not to let fame go to her head. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Julie Mattson can barely speak. Forty-eight hours earlier, the senior materials systems engineering major had stood on the field at Notre Dame Stadium, blowing clarinet with “the greatest marching band in the history of the universe,” as she and her bandmates like to immodestly boast.

The game, of course, produced a Trojan win for the ages. And somewhere amid the exhortations and celebrations, Mattson had lost her voice.

Even so, she waxes eloquent on the prestige and near-overwhelming pride she has gained during her four years with the USC Trojan Marching Band.

This year, Mattson is responsible for more than just combining the right notes with the right steps. As general manager of the Spirit of Troy, she is charged with enormous logistical, communication and personnel responsibilities.

“My friends think it’s a ton of work – like, ‘Oh my God, how do you do that and school?’” Mattson croaks, sounding scratchier than a Beat Junkies track.

Her management duties – which include coordinating itineraries and lodgings for road trips – take up to 15 hours a week. That’s in addition to a dozen hours of band practice and performance. Mattson is also the communications gatekeeper between the Spirit of Troy’s paid staffers and its student band section leaders. In all, she oversees 300 musicians.

“I have to make sure that every single person in the band knows what’s going on all the time,” she says. “Whether it be on a trip or playing at a volleyball game or practices. Anything.” In recent years, “anything” has extended beyond sporting events to appearances on TV shows like “Hollywood Squares” and “Las Vegas,” not to mention the 2004 Grammy Awards, with the hip-hop band OutKast.

Celebrity can be intoxicating for a girl from Eagan, Minn.

“When you’re on campus,” Mattson says, “and you tell people in your class, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh! You’re in the band. That’s so cool! Did you go on this trip? What did you do? Oh my gosh, you were on TV!’”

2
RadioHead

Richard Esguerra
General Manager
KSCR

Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Richard Esguerra has such a prototypically cool gig that the junior communications major from Camarillo, Calif., is one of the few unpaid working Trojans.

He is general manager of KSCR 1560-AM, the college radio station broadcasting out of David X. Marks Tower and on the Internet (www.kscr.org).

“I believe, without a doubt,” Esguerra says, “that this is one of the coolest jobs on campus.”

His responsibilities bring him together with the station’s concert director, promotions director, street team, Web crew, venue security – everyone and everything to improve the product.

As a KSCR executive, Esguerra also commands prime airtime. He and DJ partner Dustin Ames spin at 10 p.m. Monday nights. Their house music and hip-hop show, “Elastic Wax,” recently featured tracks by Four Tet, Atmosphere and the Juan MacLean.

That playlist is more esoteric than the indie heroes populating KSCR’s top-10 chart. One recent list began with Sufjan Stevens and the Go! Team, and included the more venerable Sigur Rós and the Dandy Warhols.

“We’re always trying our best to stay true to the mission, ” he says – which is, by the way, “to bring the freshest music to campus and to Los Angeles.”

Though he’s unpaid, Esguerra has reason to believe his efforts will eventually pay off. Many Trojans who work at the station and put in “top effort,” he says, end up with real jobs – even leadership roles – in greater Los Angeles radio.

“On top of the fun,” he says, “we’re given a de facto introduction into what it is to work at a radio station.”

3
A Gig She Can Dig

Ashley Sands
Undergraduate
Researcher, Archaeological Research Collection

Ashley Sands shares a favorite object in the collection: a 300 BCE Egyptian totem meant to protect mothers during childbirth. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

If it weren’t for “Love and Sex in the Ancient World,” Ashley Sands wouldn’t be holding ancient history in her hands.

The junior religion major wouldn’t have co-authored an academic paper and presented it at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Philadelphia. And certainly, this Beaverton, Ore., resident (who has never traveled outside the United States) wouldn’t be packing her bags to visit a Turkish excavation site.

Sands fell into all this when religion scholar Lynn Swartz Dodd, who teaches the aforementioned General Education course, announced a student job opening in USC’s Archaeological Research Collection. Curious, Sands descended into the basement of Mark Taper Hall of Humanities to have a look.

It brims with display cases and shelves holding more than 5,000 objects – the oldest dating back 12,000 years – gathered from across the ancient world.

The collection includes cuneiform tablets, weaponry, religious iconography, ceramic crockery, funeral pieces and fertility objects. Recently, Sands has been sifting through dirt samples from Kenan Tepe and Ziyaret Tepe – respectively, a Middle Bronze Age (1800-1700 BCE) site in Turkey and a Late Iron Age (900-600 BCE) Assyrian palace. The former has kilns; the latter, evidence of metal manufacturing. Catching the tiniest fragments of ancient artifacts using a wet sieve, Sands examines them under a scanning electron microscope.

The work has already yielded a significant historical conclusion: smelting technology derives from the pre-existing pottery industry.

“It’s hard to know how [humans] made those leaps and bounds in technology,” Sands says. “This research is helping us fill in the gaps.”

4
Out Cruisin’ Every Night

Joe Turner
Field Supervisor
Campus Cruiser Service

“We’re not chained to a desk,” says Joe Turner. “We see all kinds of amazing stuff.” Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Joe Turner isn’t driving just any Ford Focus. Clad in a black polo shirt with an embroidered insignia, he’s piloting Campus Cruiser car 657. His radio call sign is “Echo Ten.”

Turner is a field supervisor for the Campus Cruiser Service – a free-of-charge “safe ride” operation that mobilizes a fleet of 24 cars and minivans and about 100 student drivers and support staff in an effort to keep the peace. Together, they transport some 1,100 Trojans nightly.

As a field supervisor, Turner delivers daily staff briefings and helps keep a large, potentially unwieldy operation running smoothly. This evening, though, Turner is behind the wheel. His destination: a nearby apartment complex not covered by the USC shuttle bus route, to ferry a student to campus.

“You feel like you’re really providing a service that’s necessary,” says the senior political science major who hails from Chicago. “We’re here because there is an urgent need for people to be safe when they’re out. And we provide that safety.”

As a driver, Turner has clocked 4,800 miles (at a rate of 15 to 20 miles per two-hour shift) in less than a year. This is his second semester with the Campus Cruiser Service. Before his promotion to field supervisor, he had been a trainer. Whatever the job title, Turner says he and his fellow Cruisers appreciate the opportunity to get out and about: “We’re not chained to a desk,” he says. “We see all kinds of amazing stuff.”

As Turner navigates his route, some uniformed football referees amble by. A student in a red zoot suit wheels along Jefferson Boulevard on a bicycle. Nearby, another student carries a prop sword.

“Spontaneity,” Turner says later. “That’s part of the job.”

It’s a job he clearly loves. “I’m not ashamed to say it,” he says. “My life sort of revolves around Cruiser. It asks a lot, but it gives you more.”

5
Almost Ready for Prime Time

Matthew Ott
Assistant General Manager
Trojan Vision

Matthew Ott on the set of “CU@USC,” Trojan Vision’s nightly talk show. Guests have included director George Lucas, actor Jason Lee, singer Fiona Apple. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

What Matthew Ott really wants to do is direct. Good thing, then, that the junior from northern California’s East Bay transferred to USC this year.

A broadcast journalism and cinema production double-major, Ott is already building his “reel.” On Friday nights, he directs a three-program block of live TV for Trojan Vision, USC’s student-run television station. The programming also airs on local cable channel LA36 and streams live over the Internet at www.trojanvision.com. “That’s really the highlight of my week,” he says.

Ott doesn’t get paid – yet – for his directing, but he earns money as Trojan Vision’s assistant general manager. “We have 13 original shows that air here at Trojan Vision, and I’m directly involved with all of them,” he says.

Competition for such paid executive jobs is stiff. Seniority factors into getting choice Trojan Vision “nightly crew” assignments (as these live-production stints are called). There’s even more competition for the paying gigs that come along whenever the channel farms out its staff and equipment as the Trojan Vision Production Group – a for-hire production company with such past clients as ESPN and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. It is Ott’s boss, the general manager, who cultivates those outside deals. The assistant GM’s purview is confined to more internal Trojan Vision matters, such as supervising programming.

Three hundred students volunteer at the channel in various pre-, post- and production capacities. Every major is welcome. “The station is just a really cool opportunity for all the students around campus,” Ott says, slipping into what sounds like a well-rehearsed recruitment pitch. “It’s a very rewarding job,” he adds, “because [Trojan Vision] is a great front for the USC community.”

And, likely, an effective career-builder. Ott’s current gig is similar in responsibilities to a network job. That’s close to, but not quite, his preferred future focus: “I’d like to get involved with a specific show at a news station. Still, [Trojan Vision] is right up my alley,” he says.

6
Fixating on Spring Break

Craig Saslow
Student Coordinator
Alternative Spring Break

Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Two springs ago, Craig Saslow found himself squatting, knees pulled to chest, inside a Navajo Nation sweat lodge in Bluff, Utah. He’d been taking a ceremonial pause from painting homes and doing repairs in neighborhood schools as a volunteer in USC’s Alterative Spring Break program.

The sweat lodge heat was intense, and Saslow, pressed close to 13 fellow Trojans, started to panic.

A Navajo elder calmed him down.

“It was likely the most spiritual experience of my life,” Saslow recalls.

That was one of four Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trips the senior creative writing and Spanish double-major from Littleton, Colo., will have taken by the time he graduates.

But he’s not just a fellow traveler: Saslow works as an ASB student coordinator. Every year he helps arrange, advertise, raise money for and oversee six distinct do-gooder expeditions for about 100 students.

Environmental awareness trips to Death Valley and to Orcas Island, Wash. Work projects at a homeless shelter in Salinas, Calif. Development and education missions to Antigua, Guatemala. And the latest Saslow-organized trip: an expedition to Isla Mujeres, Mexico, to help islanders preserve their native ways in the face of encroaching tourism.

“It’s important to get outside of your comfort zone, to feel like an outsider every once in a while,” Saslow says of the trips he puts together. “Otherwise all that classroom learning has no relevance. You’ve got to be able to apply the skills you learn at USC to the world at large. I think these trips provide that opportunity.”

7
Scantastic Voyage

Mark Corley
Staff Member
West Semitic Research Project Scanning Lab

Don’t be fooled by all the digital technology. Mark Corley’s job positions him nicely for a future in ancient Semitic philology. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

On a typically sunny Southern California day, Mark Corley works in a small, windowless room filled with bulky imaging equipment. As the machines whir, their white noise camouflages the solemnity of his task.

The décor offers a few clues, however. Posters and prints on the wall display the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Leningrad Codex. This is the West Semitic Research Project scanning lab, and Corley is inputting detailed photographs of the Codex – the oldest complete, preserved Hebrew Bible – into an image database called InscriptiFact. The photos were painstakingly taken by religion professor Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research Project and developer of the system that now holds more than 100,000 detailed close-ups of ancient inscriptions.

“It’s like the Internet for Masoretic texts,” says Corley, a senior psycholinguistics major from Cleveland.

While another student scans, Corley adjusts a high-resolution image for clarity. Next he catalogs the text, figuring out where it comes from and who wrote it.

“With every click, you’re discovering something,” he says. “It’s like you’re a detective. You’re figuring out the data so it can be interpreted later.”

Corley realizes the potential impact of this work. Images he prepares for the Web today will allow an archaeologist in Cairo tomorrow to closely scrutinize inscriptions housed in a museum in Berlin. “It stimulates the academic inquiry into what these texts say and how we interpret them,” he says.

Corley also realizes the impact this job could have on his own graduate school applications and beyond. “This is the first time I’ve found a job that’s directly related to what I want to do with the rest of my life,” he says.

His goal: to be a Semitic philologist, a scholar of ancient texts and cultures. Or, as Corley puts it, “a scribe.”

8
A Walking Explorer

Joe Herrold
Undergraduate Assistant Researcher

“People think that’s cool,” says Joe Herrold of his work in a neuroscience lab conducting research that holds hope of curing injury-induced paralysis. Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Joe Herrold is used to people’s eyes glazing over when he describes his research in the lab of USC neurobiologist Samantha Butler. It concerns chemical signaling of axonal guidance in developing nervous systems.

Those same eyes grow round, though, when he mentions that this work – should it produce the desired results – holds out the hope of curing injury-induced paralysis. “People think that’s cool,” says the senior biology major and international relations minor from Indianapolis.

Operating a $500,000 piece of equipment called a confocal microscope, Herrold examines transverse sections of spinal cords taken from mice and chicks. He had sliced these microscopic tissue specimens with a powerful sub-zero knife called a cryostat. Wavelength-specific lasers built into the microscope let him visualize the expression of specific proteins in the spinal cord sections, each stained with fluorescent antibodies. Once they are analyzed, Herrold reassembles the sections in a 3-D model using the confocal microscope.

“I have a lot of responsibility,” says the future physician in USC’s elite BA/MD program, “not just because I work with this expensive equipment but also because these projects are vital to my professor’s research.”

Just how vital? “If we understand particular properties,” Herrold says, outlining the study’s long-range goals, “we can [theoretically] infuse new cells into the patient, give a chemo-signal that we’ve researched and developed to guide the neuron back down the spinal cord – re-wire it – and essentially cure paralysis.”

During a late-afternoon break in his lab duties, Herrold chats on a cell phone as he walks from the Hedco Neurosciences Building to a planning meeting. (He is organizing a medical service mission to El Salvador in March.)

The bounce in his stride is perhaps attributable to an awareness that this deceptively simple action – ambulating – may one day be restored to victims of injury-induced paralysis thanks, in small part, to his efforts.

9
Sub-zero Scientist

David Ginsburg
Teaching Assistant
Department of Biological Sciences

David Ginsburg in Antarctica (below, far right) and teaching a lab class at USC. “I really love what I do,” he says. “I’m doing biology 24 hours a day.” Photo by S. Peter Lopez

The day after USC won the 2004 college football championship, David Ginsburg went scuba diving – in Antarctica.

A doctoral candidate in marine biology, Ginsburg plunged under ice and sea, collecting samples of invertebrate larvae near Ross Island, the site of the continent’s main U.S. research station.

He is part of a USC team led by marine biologist Donal Manahan that regularly voyages to Antarctica. That January day, after surfacing, Ginsburg and a trio of colleagues posed for a photo holding a celebratory Trojan banner.

Ginsburg wore a shiny cardinal and gold drysuit and an interlocking ’SC cap. Holding a victory cigar in his right hand, he looked part Figueroa reveler, part intrepid explorer. “It’s really an amazing experience,” he says of his polar sojourns. “Sometimes you feel like you’re going to places that no one’s ever been. And that’s probably often the case.”

When back at USC, Ginsburg’s work is less outlandish. As a teaching assistant for introductory biology courses, he supervises undergraduate lab sessions and explains the taxonomic characteristics of invertebrates.

“I really love what I do,” he says. “I’m doing biology 24 hours a day. I feel really lucky to be able to walk into a classroom and be able to answer questions and teach people things that I’m doing right now.”

Ginsburg’s one regret is that so many of his students seem to be headed for careers in health care, not research. He hopes to be an exemplar to them: a scientist who spends his summers doing open-ocean research (at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies on Catalina Island) and his winters at the antipodes, mingling with seals, whales, penguins and a handful of homo sapiens.

No stethoscope or otoscope required there – but a great deal of understanding and respect for nature. “Ask your doctor some time how a starfish works,” Ginsburg challenges. “He won’t know.”

10
Winter Blonde

Lisa Yemm
Lifeguard

Photo by S. Peter Lopez

Eight weeks into the 2005 fall semester, Lisa Yemm flew home to St. Louis for the weekend. Yemm’s mom took one look at her golden daughter and advised her to spend less time in the sun. Yemm’s sister was jealous.

“She doesn’t want to stand next to me in pictures anymore,” the junior accounting major says, laughing. “She goes to school up in New York, so she doesn’t have the color I have.”

That year-round Coppertone tan comes from working 15 hours a week as a lifeguard – 20 minutes up on the high chair, then 20 minutes in the office.

“It’s a lot of watching; it’s a lot of waiting,” Yemm says. “But it’s making sure that everyone around you is safe.”

As a shift supervisor, Yemm has charge of three other lifeguards who monitor the two pools at the McDonald’s Swim Stadium. “I’ve been really fortunate,” she says. “I haven’t had to deal with a major emergency in my time at the school. Knock on wood.”

Not that she couldn’t handle one.

Student lifeguards regularly practice rescue techniques. They have to stay particularly focused during team practices. When the diving team works out, for example, lifeguards are the first responders and must tend any injuries.

But when all is well, Yemm’s job can’t be beat. Perched on her 10-foot-high lifeguard chair, she gets paid to sunbathe. In her line of sight are palm trees and blue skies. Endless summer, indeed.

“That’s why everyone comes to California – for the sunshine,” Yemm grins. “And this job is one where you get a lot of sunshine.”

Jeremy Rosenberg is a Los Angeles-based writer. This is his first story for USC Trojan Family Magazine.