Graham and Parks School students Max Martin (left) and Sasu Siegelbaum look over the Harvard Gazette with John Lenger, assistant director of the News Office and editor-in-chief of the Gazette.

At Graham and Parks School in Cambridge, there is a program for seventh-graders called City Sites. For a week of school, students are assigned to a job and work there for that week.

Some of the sites include Bertucci's, Toscanini's, The Inn at Harvard, and, in our case, the Harvard News Office. We consider ourselves very lucky to have this site. When we first were told that the News Office was going to be our site we didn't know what it was going to be like, and expected that we would be photocopying the whole day.

But when we got here, we knew we were going to have a good time. The person behind the front desk, Evan Whitney, buzzed our supervisor, John Lenger, and humorously referred to us as "the new victims." We weren't expecting everyone to have a sense of humor, but it was a sign of what was to come.

Everyone at the office was extremely nice and welcoming, and made us feel right at home. One of the first things that we did was talk to John, the editor of the Gazette; he was also our supervisor. We never really knew how a newspaper was put together. We can honestly say that now we do.

We learned the ever-important skill of good proofreading -- and our teachers will be happy about that. We also learned how a newspaper is put together using a computer program called QuarkXPress. This is a really interesting program because it makes putting together a newspaper very easy. We didn't only work on the newspaper, we also worked on the Harvard News Website. We helped John update the stories and choose the best ones to be listed in the "new news" category. It was pretty amazing to see what you had just typed appear instantaneously on the Internet. The Net is an amazing thing, and if you would like to view the News Office's site, and maybe see some things that we did, go to http://www.news.harvard.edu.

Another thing that we did was go to the News Office photo lab. In the lab we were introduced to one of the photographers, Rose Lincoln. She was very nice. She showed us negatives and how they are scanned into a computer. We were shown a program called Adobe Photoshop, and were allowed to play around with it. It had some really interesting and fun features, and Rose showed us how to take heads from people in one picture and put them onto the bodies of other people. She also told us that this was something that was never done in newspapers. We also tried using filters, which can make the image seem grainy or metallic. Using Photoshop was very enjoyable, and we're glad that we got to use it. After that, Rose showed us some fancy cameras and lenses, and explained about them. She then took us to Harvard Square where we took random photos of people. The next day, photographer Kris Snibbe helped us make contact sheets and print our images from the negatives.

We had a very fun and interesting view of what it's like to be given the responsibilities of having a job. It was great to be able to have some time off from school and do something fun and educational at the same time. END