Ah, summer vacation. Three months for new adventures, internships and geographies; money-making opportunities and chances to simply play it cool. We asked around to learn how 10 Stanford students are spending their summers. Their responses could make a working stiff green with envy.
SHARON WULFOVICH, ’17, undeclared: Wulfovich is spending the summer on a pair of trips tied to her culture and religion. First, she'll visit Israel with members of Hillel at Stanford. Then it's on to Poland, a trip sponsored by the country’s government, where she’ll learn how country and society moved on from the Holocaust. It will be a study in contrasts, she says, going from the Jewish homeland to a place where much of her family was exterminated. At Auschwitz II, she’ll pay respects at barrack No. 9, where her grandfather endured the horrors of the Nazi death camp. “It’s very important to see what he went through and understand,” she says.
ISABEL ARJMAND, ’16, management science and engineering: Next year, she may take a resume-buffing research position. But after much debate, she decided this was the moment for a road less travelled. In July, Arjmand will embark on a two-day journey to the island nation of Mauritius, 1,200 miles off the coast of Africa, where she will teach English. For someone interested in education, it gives her the chance to lead a classroom. Of course, she could have done that closer to home—or in China, where she also had a teaching opportunity. But she can imagine visiting China later in life, she says. Living with a family on an island in the Indian Ocean? Not so much. “I feel like this was the summer to try something different.”
CHRISTIAN ANGULO, ’14, political science: After a family cruise in the Caribbean, Angulo will spend the summer living on campus and working as student manager and guide at the Visitor Center while knuckling down for the LSAT in September. It’s a perfect way to study while enjoying one last stint at the job he’s held and loved for years: Summer tour groups can number into the hundreds. “Should be fun times,” he says.
KATRINA ZAMUDIO, ’14, geology: Zamudio’s first trip overseas will take her far from the beaten path. Ahead of her co-term in geophysics, she’ll head to Tibet to collect water and gas samples for her thesis. At average altitudes of nearly 15,000 feet with plenty of hiking, the trip will present challenges even for an outdoorsy Coloradoan. So, too, will the diet. Her advisor warned her vegetarianism could be impossible to maintain during the trip. On a funded trip for her master’s research, she’s willing to compromise, even if it means eating yak.
MARIE MILLER, ’14, archeology: After working spring quarter to get certified in First Aid, CPR and advanced open-water SCUBA diving, Miller heads to the southeast coast of Sicily to work on a Stanford excavation of a Byzantine shipwreck. It will be a far cry from her previous fieldwork—on land sites—near her home in Maryland. There she was often dealing with discarded and scattered items. In Italy, she’ll be surveying an entire scene no soul intended to leave: “It’s more of snapshot in time.” Her word to the wise: Few undergrads know you don’t have to be a budding archeologist to join the department’s summer trips around the world. Anyone can apply.
THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT: Mangat will begin work as a tech entrepreneur.
SIMAR MANGAT, ’17, undeclared: This rising sophomore won’t be taking any international sojourns. His focus is on scaling heights as a tech entrepreneur. After winning $8,000 through a contest run by the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, and then rousing interest from VC firms, he and fellow freshmen Sawyer Altman and Jason Teplitz scrapped their internships at Silicon Valley start-ups. Instead they’ll spend the summer working full time on Peeps—their cloud-based network management app. “Getting a chance to dive in . . . that’s always been fun and exciting,” says Mangat.
MICHAEL KIM, ’17, undeclared: Kim received a grant through the Center for Latin American Studies to head to Lima, Peru, for six weeks. There, he’ll teach digital skills to leaders in impoverished communities on the capital’s outskirts. It’s his third summer in Latin America. As a high school student, he spent summers in Paraguay and Oaxaca, Mexico, where he studied indigenous languages in addition to Spanish. After Peru, he’ll come home to San Jose, Calif., to volunteer at the Mexican Consulate. Then it’s back to campus for Sophomore College. The class? The New Millennium Mix: Crossings of Race & Culture. “It’s perfect for a Korean-American who’s in love with Latin America, like me.”
EVELYN XUE, ’16, mechanical engineering: At press time, Xue was still considering automobile-industry research positions, but intends to dedicate at least half the summer to improving her pottery and moving off the wheel into hand-shaping and sculpturing. A potter since middle school, she plans to sell her work—vases, bowls, mugs, kettles and the like on Etsy, but her broad goal is to expand her creative portfolio to enable her to pursue jobs in product design and manufacturing: “I really want to stretch my creative abilities.” Xue will live on campus at Governor’s Corner.
DAIMEN SAGASTUME, ’17, undeclared: Sagastume is eyeing a future as a doctor, and will spend a week in the Santa Cruz Mountains as a counselor at Camp Kesem, helping bring joy to the campers, all children of cancer patients. After, he’ll start work at a clinical HIV/AIDS research lab at UC-San Diego. For Sagastume, the position is a triple coup—it’s paid, it involves infectious disease, and it takes him back home to San Diego for the first time in six months, the longest he’s ever been away from family (and San Diego beaches). “Coming to Stanford, I didn’t realize how much I absolutely love San Diego.”
LUCIO MONDAVI, ’15, mechanical engineering: 
INTERNATIONAL ADVENTURE: Mondavi is excited to spend a summer among strangers.This rising senior fell for Italy while studying in Florence last fall. And so he immediately began sending his resumé to Stanford alums in the country looking for a job—not an easy quest given the country’s economy. But one alum offered an internship at his engineering company, which designs and manufactures pumps for the water and gas industries. Mondavi will spend the summer working in Milan, where he knows just one person. That’s fine by him. “I see the ideal summer as a time to have an experience that would be entirely impossible while at Stanford.”
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford.
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