Clearing the path to a career-building summer

By Stephanie Silva Momoko Nakazawa, a fourth-year linguistics major at UC Santa Cruz, spent her summer researching the honky-tonks and performers keeping country music alive in Japan for an upcoming exhibition at the Autry Museum of the American West. “The research is a perfect fit for me,” she said. “I love music, and I’m Japanese.” The Autry is just a few blocks from where Nakazawa grew up in Los Angeles. She wanted to spend the summer at home with her family, and a funded internship through the university’s Summer Humanities EXCEL program meant she could get paid to do archival research, a field she’s hoping to build a career in. In Santa Cruz County, Virginia Martinez Najera, a business management economics major, spent the summer introducing a universal children’s savings account program to new parents. A first-generation transfer student from Santa Maria, Martinez Najera knew the internship she wanted with Ventures, a Watsonville nonprofit, couldn’t afford to pay her.