Pitt's Honors College and English Department Team Up to Present Internship Panel Featuring Michael S. Dukakis Oct. 15

PITTSBURGH-Michael S. Dukakis, a former Massachusetts governor and the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, will address an internship panel at 8 p.m. Oct. 15 hosted by the University of Pittsburgh's Honors College and School of Arts and Sciences Department of English at the Twentieth Century Club Auditorium, 4201 Bigelow Blvd., Oakland.

The event, also sponsored by "The Pitt News," is open to students and the public. The winner of the annual Al McDowell Memorial Scholarship, named in memory of the Pittsburgh broadcasting pioneer and 1952 School of Arts and Sciences graduate, will be announced during the evening.

The program is titled "The Essential Internship: Snaring One in the Media, Public Relations, and Publishing." The panel's scope has been broadened to include internships in public policy, government, and politics. A question-and-answer session will follow the discussion. Students also will have the opportunity to talk with speakers at a dessert reception to be held after the program.

In addition to Dukakis, a political science professor at Northeastern University, panelists include Stacy Smith, KDKA-TV news anchor; Jessica Bayer, senior associate for recruitment at Burson-Marsteller; Susan Goldberg, editor for "The Plain Dealer" in Cleveland; Elham Khatami, Pitt student with internships at CNN.com and the "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette;" John Sullivan III, executive editor at Bedford/St. Martin's; and Kerala Taylor, editor-in-chief at Glimpse.org. David Shribman, executive editor of the "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette," will moderate.

Brief biographies of the panelists can be obtained at http://www.pitt.edu/news2009/InternPanelBios.doc

Michael S. Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants, began his political career as an elected Town Meeting member in Brookline, Mass., in 1959 while still a student at Harvard Law School. He was elected chair of his town's Democratic organization in 1960, won a seat in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1962, and served four terms as a legislator, winning re-election by an increasing margin each time he ran. In 1970, he was the Massachusetts Democratic Party's nominee for Lieutenant Governor and the running mate of Boston mayor Kevin White. They lost that year's race.

Dukakis won his party's nomination for Governor in 1974 as well as the election in November of that year. He inherited a record deficit and record-high unemployment and is generally credited with digging Massachusetts out of one of its worst financial and economic crises in its history. He lost the election in 1978, won in 1982, and was re-elected to an unprecedented third four-year term in 1986 by one of the largest margins in history. In 1986, his colleagues in the National Governors' Association voted him the most effective governor in the nation.

Dukakis won the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States in 1988 but was defeated by George Bush. He announced that he would not be a candidate for re-election as governor. After leaving office in January 1991, Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, spent three months at the University of Hawaii where Dukakis was a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of Public Health. While at the University of Hawaii, he taught courses in political leadership and health policy and led a series of public forums on the reform of the nation's health-care system. There has been increasing public interest in Hawaii's first-in-the-nation universal health insurance system as the nation debates the future of health care in America.

Since June 1991, Dukakis has been a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University and visiting professor at the School of Public Policy at University of California Los Angeles. His research has focused on national health-care policy reform and the lessons that national policy makers can learn from state reform efforts. He and former U.S. Senator Paul Simon authored the book "How to Get Into Politics-and Why" (Great Source Education Group, 2000) to encourage young people to think seriously about politics and public service as a career.

For more information, contact Writing Internship Coordinator Caren Marcus at 412-624-1737 or caren@pitt.edu.

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10/7/09/tmw