I first heard about Wellesley's new Elisabeth Luce Moore '24 Hong Kong Summer Intership Program at a Japanese department meeting. Prior to that, my plans for the summer of 1999 had been vague to say the least. Well, I could have gone back to the publishing company in Des Moines at which I'd interned the previous summer, working in their New Media department. I could have taken a job with Wellesley IS and worked on campus. Iowa, Wellesley, both safe, familiar, unadventurous places.

The chance to spend a summer interning in Hong Kong -- a teeming metropolis in Asia -- a place unlike any other I'd ever been -- entirely foreign, but also the home of a good friend -- came like a bolt of inspiration. There were no conditions to bar me, no Chinese language requirement, no insistence on major, background, experience, not even a single limitation on the types of internships available. The only requirements, it seemed, were a "sense of adventure" and a willingness to learn from all kinds of experiences.

To ignore such a chance, I thought, would be beyond stupid. It was time to stop shutting myself up in the familiar, the known, the comfortable. It was time to open, to go someplace radically new and soak it up thirstily. It was, I realized, exactly what I needed at that moment. Now to communicate that conviction to the people with the means to send me.

"Tell us what you want to do," the application said. So I did in the two-page essay, as best I could, and did it again in the interview. It was a bit daunting to face four critical strangers behind a table, when my last employment interview had been for a sales clerk position at a Hallmark shop, and had lasted all of five minutes.

What I wanted to do, I said, was go and experience. In return, I said, I would document: record in words and images what Hong Kong meant to me, and to the other interns who would be my fellow travelers.

This is that record. Let the summer begin.