Name: Laura Jeanne Hammond
Current position: VP/Editor-in-Chief, Next Step
Magazine internship/year: National Geographic Traveler/2000

A Washington, D.C.-based ASME intern for National Geographic Traveler in the summer of 2000, Laura Jeanne Hammond joined Next Step Publishing Inc. in 2001, after her graduation from the University of Missouri-Columbiasumma cum laude with a concentration in magazine editing. She has since become the Editor-in-Chief of Next Step, a national college-prep magazine whose tagline is, "Your life, after high school."

"Without an ASME internship," she said, "I wouldn't have had the confidence to become editor of a magazine at age 21.

Although her Traveler stint was her only ASME internship, Hammond also interned for the Messenger-Post daily and weekly newspapers in the Rochester, NY area; The Express, a London-based tabloid for which she contributed a gossip column; the City and Regional Magazine Association; and Next Step.

She pointed out, "I worked at Next Step through high school and college, so working full-time as Editor has been an obvious 'next step' for me. My publisher has given me incredible autonomy since day one."

The Victor, NY-based Next Step is distributed in more than 20,500 high schools nationwide. "We have a print run of about 300,000 five times a year," she said, "plus special editions for adult learners, parents and transfer students." Under her editorship, Next Step has won awards from the Association of Educational Publishers and others.

Hammond recollected, "I grew up in Rochester and went to college at the University of Missouri. I distinctly remember my mom saying to me, 'Wouldn't it be fantastic if you moved back to Rochester and worked for Next Step after college?'

Thinking back to her intern days, Hammond said, "I chose Traveler as my number one intern spot because I wanted to experience the history of the National Geographic Society, but with what I thought would be a smaller staff. I sat in on cover meetings, worked on website listings, fact checked, got to read the blue lines and ordered products to review for the annual gift guide. I would have been happy just getting coffee for my editors!"

Her byline in Travelers holiday gift guide was the highlight of her internship. Hammond recalls. The publisher might have noticed a circulation uptick since, as she confessed, "I bought a bazillion copies!"

And regarding spending that summer in D.C., she remarked, "The 10 or so ASME interns got along just fine. Our dorm suite, although without air conditioning, was the coolest one at Georgetown. And we all took great pride in memorizing the bus route."

Her most valuable lesson as an intern? "I had to accuracy-check a listing for a small hotel in Italy, so I got to the office really early to make up for the time difference. I had an Italian phrase book and practiced some opening lines. It took about two seconds of my fumbling for the receptionist to switch to perfect English, and leave me feeling less than suave. It reminded me that everyone is my superior in some wayand sometimes it doesn't take long to figure out how!"

That experience, she added, "inspired me to take foreign-language classes. I took Arabic while in D.C. and French for two years after college."

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Name: Jean Chatzky
Current position: Editor-at-Large, Money
Magazine internship/year: Advertising Age, 1985

Jean Chatzky, who as Jean Sherman worked as an ASME intern at Advertising Age in 1985, has been Editor-at-Large at Money since early 1998, writing a column and editing personal-finance stories. Her Money career was preceded by five years at rival monthly SmartMoney, as part of the DowJones/Hearst startup's staff.

Raised in Wheeling, WV, and Madison, WI, she said, "That taste of [New York City] was incredible." Moreover, the internship "convinced me I could do this [a journalism career]; I wasn't convinced before that. Working at a major magazine and getting a byline or two was fantastic. It was a great introduction to the New York magazine world. And I made contacts that I still have today."

Before she got her ASME assignment letter at University of Pennsylvania, Chatzky said she had wished for Glamour or Mademoiselle. But she soon changed her mind and was glad that she had instead landed at a weekly magazine.

She recalled that her first bylined story was about Tom's of Maine toothpaste. She also remembered covering a story at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, NY, where she met actor Matt Dillon. "That was totally cool for a 19-year-old."

The ASME internship definitely helps one's career, Chatzky felt. "Being a past ASME intern is always on your resume because it carries a lot of weight, especially for that first job." Those hiring at magazines not only know about the program, she added, but in many cases have participated in it themselves.

Chatzkys first post-internship job was with Working Woman in 1986. And that's where her interest in money matters first took root. Working Woman had "a strange dichotomyhalf women's service and half business and career." Hired as assistant to the business editor, she remarked, "I found I really enjoyed that. I wasn't afraid of using numbers to tell a story."

The biggest lesson she derived from interning was that "ideas are what carry the most importance," she noted. "If you can continue coming up with ideas, you'll always find a job" in the field.

Jumping ahead to the present, Chatzky says the months leading up to the April 15 income tax deadline are among her most hectic periods, "especially for TV." She's been offering tax tips to viewers of Today as that NBC morning show's financial advisor; the "Money Monday" tips (e.g., on taxing dividends, tax breaks for freelancers, maximizing deductions) also appear on the MSNBC website. In addition, she has written about electronic filing for the New York Daily News, and her "Personal Finance" column goes into syndication in April via United Features.

Chatzky's schedule has also accelerated at Time Inc.'s Money, now that a redesign has doubled her column's space to two inside pages, versus one back page previously. Her column also sports a new title, with "Your Money and Your Life" replacing "Money Talk."

In her spare time, she has authored such books as Talking Money (Warner Books, 2001).

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Name: Catherine Cavender
Current position: Editor-in-Chief, Diversion
Magazine internship/year: Redbook, 1978

Cathy Cavender joined Hearst Business Publishing Inc.s Diversion last summer and has since redesigned the monthly for "physicians at leisure." She says, "I'm thoroughly enjoying getting to edit and write about longtime personal passions like travel, food, wine and gardening." Before that, Cavender was Deputy Editor of Lifetime, a spinoff of the Lifetime cable network, a joint venture of Hearst Corp. and Walt Disney Co.

Arguably, her most high-profile post was as Editor-in-Chief of Rosie, which Gruner + Jahr USA began publishing in spring 2001 after having morphed it from McCall's. Earlier Cavender was Executive Editor of McCall's and Editor-in-Chief of TV Guide's Celebrity Dish. Prior to 1995, Cavender held editorial posts at YM and Seventeen, with what she dubs "a brief time-out to do PR for Parade after [editorial jobs at] Redbook and before Mademoiselle."

Fondly looking back on her ASME internship, Cavender says, "It truly was my big break. I had gone to three colleges by the end of my sophomore year, including a miserable semester at a conservatory, when it dawned on me that I wasn't nearly good enough ever to play at Carnegie Hall." After becoming an English major and deciding on a journalism career, she adds, "I did everything I possibly could on campus that was journalism-related. I still remember getting my ASME acceptance letter out of the P.O. box at college."

As for the internship experience itself, she describes that as "exceptional on so many levels. I worked with wonderful people I was at Redbook when the legendary Sey Chassler was the editor, and I still remember that he took time to personally go over with me a story I wrote on orchids." She even recalls "the pickle lunches where I saw that editors-in-chief were actually just real people. That was a revelation."

While living at NYU's Weinstein Hall, she says she enjoyed hearing about other interns' experiences. "It was sort of like interning on 30 magazines at once." To intern, she had to move to the Big Apple "one of the best things about the internship.

The most valuable lesson she learned from that summer stint? "That even when you have a great opportunity like an ASME internship, you still have to let your bosses know what you want." Noting that no one could recall the 1977 Redbook intern, she says, "I wanted to be remembered and I wanted a job! So I knew I had to find ways to demonstrate that." Besides her orchids article, she says she came away with a bylined piece on "A Different Kind of Pet for Your Child," about guinea pigs and gerbils.

The following spring, she landed a job at Redbook, as articles department editorial assistant. "The fact that the staff knew me from the summer before was a huge advantage," she notes.

Cavender says she still has lunch often with a fellow intern from 27 years ago. "In fact, her husband's a doctor and we just interviewed him for Diversion." And she points out, "Even though I didn't end up performing at Carnegie Hall, I now work directly across the street!"

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Name: Jeffrey Giles
Current position: Senior Editor, Newsweek
Magazine internship/year: Newsweek, 1986

Jeff Giles, who joined Newsweek as a general editor in 1993, rose to a senior writer in the Arts section in 1996 and Senior Editor in December 1997. He writes profiles, features and reviews for the magazine

Looking back on his internship, Giles says, "The fact that I was an ASME alum got me a job at The New Yorker, where I met my wife [Jennifer Bevill, an illustrator]. And then it got me this job at Newsweek." Half-jokingly, he says, "The internship got me my marriage, my friends and my career." More seriously, he notes, "It also literally taught me how to be a fact-checker and a reporter and it gave me a great glimpse into what magazine writing was and could be."

While an intern, he became a campus stringer for People. "Even after I'd left Newsweek and gone back to Brown University for senior year," he notes, "I was filing things like Amy Carter interviews for People."

Before being hired by Newsweek in 1993, Giles was a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, wrote the "Nightlife" column for The New Yorker, and freelanced extensively for Details and Entertainment Weekly.

Giles, who grew up in Cohasset, MA, had to move to Manhattan for the internship. "Apart from some Yankee games that I'd gone to as a kid, I'd never been anywhere near New York City." Recalling a conversation with Jack Nicholson, Giles says the actor, who made The Witches of Eastwick in Cohasset, asked, "What's the name of your beach? Rocky Beach? Yeah, I was gonna buy that."