Kathleen Barker expected to spend her summer answering phones and filing paperwork as part of Washington's Summer Youth Employment Program. Instead the 18-year-old spends her days sorting through trays of spiders -- and she couldn't be happier.

Barker works in the lab of biology professor Gina Wimp, helping the professor on two projects involving habitat fragmentation of New Jersey's salt marshes. It's far from what Barker expected when she joined the program.

For the 2009 National Cathedral School graduate, the employment program "started as a back-up plan because it's guaranteed for all residents of D.C. from ages 14-21," Barker says. "The job market being what it is, and given that I had no work experience prior to this, I figured I'd go ahead and sign up."

Later Barker ran into Brenda Atkinson-Willoughby, Georgetown's director of community and government relations, at this spring's job expo for D.C. youth. Atkinson-Willoughby met Barker while recruiting students to work at Georgetown over the summer. After learning of Barker's plan to major in the science at Rice University next year, Atkinson-Willoughby matched her with Wimp.

Barker is one of 10 young D.C. workers earning a paycheck on the Hilltop this summer from June 17 to Aug. 21. Students are assigned to several departments on campus including University Information Services (UIS), biology, athletics, human resources, external affairs and offices within the School of Nursing and Health Studies, Walsh School of Foreign Service and McDonough School of Business. The city pays youth workers, though some Georgetown offices supplement their students' pay.

"Georgetown has been involved in hiring students in the summer for several years, but only on a small scale with a few each summer," Atkinson-Willoughby explains.

She and her boss, Linda Greenan, associate vice president for external relations, decided to open the door to more students this year. Atkinson-Willoughby knew she wanted to go beyond just filling jobs, and set out to match students with their fields of interest, some times recruiting university offices as employers.

"We want to make this a meaningful experience for the students, especially if they haven't been exposed to the work environment before," Atkinson-Willoughby says. "It gives them a chance to find out if this is a good fit for them, or not. Either way, they can learn more about fields they're interested in."

Eighteen-year-old Roosevelt high School graduate Filimon Hagos, says working with a UIS team on networking, phone and computer service calls around the university has proven beneficial.

"This job is helping a lot," says Hagos, who plans to study mechanical engineering when he attends Pennsylvania State University in the fall. "I get to take apart computers to see the hardware inside and understand more about how computers work."

He's also learning a bit about accountability. Hagos joined the summer employment program last year and worked at a local church on various projects. But, he says, no one held him responsible for showing up at set times and work could be sporadic.

"This is definitely the real world now. People show up at the same time every day and expect me to, too," Hagos says. "I would feel like I was slacking off if I didn't."

Anthony Vitelli, UIS team manager, has found an enthusiastic learner in Hagos and another student working with UIS for the summer.

"There is a learning curve because neither have experience in this area. But they're eager and willing to do pretty much whatever needs to be done," Vitelli says. "At the same time, I want them to have a good time and feel like they're part of the team here."

Barker had doubts that she could be on equal footing with the five others who work in Wimp's lab this summer. But the mix of undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs do the same work as Barker. Along the way, she has learned more about what it means to work in a lab.

"You're actually looking for results, as opposed to high school, where if you don't get the expected results, you did the lab wrong," she says. "I was a little nervous coming in with only a year of AP biology, but it's been fantastic."

Wimp gives Barker the same responsibilities as others in her lab to help prepare the student for an undergraduate career in the sciences.

"People have a glorified or glamorous notion of what that is, but you need to experience the real deal to see that it's all of the excitement, plus the tedium that goes along with it," Wimp says. "Kathleen has picked up on things quickly and she's been very brave -- especially with the spiders."

Atkinson-Willoughby says she's pleased with the work the students have been doing, and is diligent about her role as the buffer between Georgetown's student workers and city bureaucracy. She plans to meet with city leaders once summer is over to offer suggestions as an employer.

But for now, Atkinson-Willoughby's focus is on the students.

"I'm going to meet with all of the kids without their supervisors to talk about the pros and cons of their work and helpful tips on how to be a good employee," she says. "It's part of our plan -- start with a small, but strong program to work out the kinks, then grow our involvement so each year we have more students from D.C. working at Georgetown."

-- Lauren Burgoon

(July 16, 2009)