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Profile
of Krystal MacIntyre, Intern, JURIST Paper Chase, Pitt Law School,
4/06
by Jamie Cortazzo Sterling
PPW/Writing Center Publicity Intern
It is a rare
internship that allows a student to work from the comfort of home,
but Krystal MacIntyre was lucky enough to find one that does. Krystal,
a senior Political Science major, interns for the University of
Pittsburgh Law School on the JURIST PaperChase website.
As a JURIST intern, Krystal reads current event news articles that
pertain to the legal world and writes up a short summary with internal
text links to related past stories, important primary resources,
and the text of the summarized AP, AFP, or Reuters article. Krystal
works 12 hours a week and produces an average of one story per half
hour. Her reports “must adhere to strict JURIST-style formatting,
which can best be compared to AP style writing.” Each report
averages three to six sentences in length.
Although Krystal loves having the ability to work from home and
to work for her extremely helpful supervisors, Bernard Hibbitts,
Professor of Law at Pitt, and Jeannie Shawl, 3L Pitt student, she
finds some aspects of her internship difficult. Krystal believes
that it is hard to stay within the thirty-minute story time frame,
especially on stories of high interest to her, or those that she
has little prior knowledge of or interest in. In addition, Krystal
had to abandon her normal tendency to be a perfectionist with her
writing so that she could meet the thirty-minute frame.
Still, this internship has allowed Krystal to gain “a ton
of valuable knowledge that will be very useful in [her] future strides
toward a law degree.” She hopes to work for a year after graduating
this spring and then attend law school in 2007. Ideally, Krystal
says she would “love to win the lottery, pay off my student
loans, and then go to law school without incurring further debt,
and live happily ever after!”
Until that happens, she is glad that the PPW program allowed her
“to gain the credibility of being a good writer without having
to pick up a second major.” She is also glad that the internship
allowed her to gain recognition for her writing. She recently Googled
her name and was surprised to see that a few reports she had written
for JURIST popped up and had been referenced by others.
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