INDY EDITOR APPLICATION
Please give short answers to the following questions. Although we would prefer to receive the applications electronically (theindy@gmail.com), you may also turn in hard copies outside Faunce 302. All applications are due by Monday, April 28 at 5pm. Feel free to email the managing editors if you have concerns, questions, general complaints or character attacks.
Prelude: What is your name?
For the purpose of conducting interviews, when will you be leaving Providence for summer break?
Will you be free next semester for the Indy’s three mandatory weekly meetings (Monday at 8pm, Wednesday at 8:30pm and Thursday at 8pm)?
1. List at least three section preferences (News, Opinions, Features, Arts, Literary, Sports, Illustrations/Photo, Design, Business/Advertising, Web):
1.
2.
3.
Important notes about section preference:
a. If you are interested in Illustrations/Photo, please enclose several samples of your work with your application.
b. If you are only interested in a non-writing section or sections (e.g. Illustrations/Photo or Design) you may disregard questions 6 through 14.
c. If Design is one of your section preferences, please include a brief description of your experience with design and layout, including any familiarity you might have with publication design software, particularly Adobe InDesign. Send us clips or PDFs of your work if you have them.
2. Why are you applying to be an Indy editor?
3. What do you like about the Indy in general (also consider the layout and graphic design)? What do you see as its faults?
4. Which specific articles and designs did you find engaging or interesting this semester?
5. On a more conceptual level, what would you change about the Indy?
6. What are four articles that you want to see in the Indy if you become an editor?
7. What do you see as the role of the Indy compared to other campus/community publications?
8. What is your experience with writing and editing? Please also list any articles you’ve written for the Indy or any other publications.
9. Tell us: a) one publication you like and read and why; b) one publication you dislike and why.
10. Give us a writing sample (an article you’ve written for the Indy, or something else if you haven’t—nothing academic, please).
11. If you have prior editing experience, please attach some examples.
12. Please edit the following article and make comments as if you were editing the article for the Indy and sending the writer comments. By all means mark up this copy—use bold text for edits if you are completing the application electronically. Do not use track changes in Microsoft Word. One approach to consider is giving specific comments within the text and general comments at the end. Go beyond copy-editing: address style, tone, structure and what you think the article is missing. We are interested in both the content of your comments and the manner in which you convey those comments to the writer.
You will need to add a title, subhead and byline. Insert ‘biflics’—section headings—where appropriate to break up the text.
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I can’t think of a title right now
Or a subhead
By George Schrege
When you’re brought up on a steady diet of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and James Blish, all you really want to do is go to Olympus Mons. The solar system’s largest volcano. 15 miles high, 340 miles in diameter. When you know the fine folks at Planetary Geology, you can go there.
Professor James Head got his start training the Apollo astronaut’s geology. Not a bad job, and not one that’s easy to top for a planetary geologist. But he’s doing his best. He’s consulted with NASA on quite a few Mars missions. One of those was the Mars Global Surveyor. He suggested (along with the Goddard Spaceflight Center) that the spacecraft include a laser altimeter. NASA gave the go-ahead, and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) was born.
The data from which is how I ended up in the cave with Prabhat. That’s his full name—a one-word name customary in his part of India. An intensely intelligent man, he’s a Graphic Systems Analyst for the Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization. That torrent of words that only computer scientists could love means, essentially, world-forger.
I stepped into the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Reality Room), and the Antarctic surrounded me. Brown’s CAVE is a small room (smaller than a Perkins Hall dorm room) where images are projected on three walls. The overall effect is eerily realistic. The glasses make everything three-dimensional. You’re surrounded by whatever the programmers want you to be surrounded by. As long as you keep your head level, the experience is immersive.
Prabhat tells me to take off my shoes and a pair of stereoscopic glasses. The glasses had a positioning device that could tell where I was and what I was looking at. He showed me a black glove that could manipulate an electronic interface. I humbly nominate the nickname “Power Glove.”
In a paper on the project, Head and many others (modern science is, above all, a collaborating effort) write that
the distances and times involved dictate that the first data from individual moons and planets comes from flybys and orbital spacecraft, perhaps in some cases evolving towards the development of a few landers and rovers, and for the Moon, human explorers.
In other words, this is the closest we’re getting for now.
It’s all very reminiscent of the Star Trek holodeck. Sadly, Brown’s CAVE doesn’t have any tactile feedback devices yet, so there’s no point in yelling “safety protocol off!”
The Antarctic is the place on Earth most like the red planet. The dry valleys there show a remarkable similarity to places near the polar cap on Mars. The best place on Earth to go to Mars. David Shean, a geology research assistant, was standing to my left when we went to that icy wasteland. And in about a week, he’ll be there in a more physical sense. He’s using the CAVE to scout out sites to see in the Antarctic. Its a serious tool for him that saves time and money. Shean is of course a little wary of his trip—who wants to spend Halloween in the Antarctic? The CAVE gives him a firmer concept of what hell be up against.
They took me to the polar cap first. It’s an area of special interest for Head, who got his research (and the research of several other University scientists) on Martian ice ages plastered on the cover of the science journal Nature, a major science journal. We flew around to and fro, checking out the intense vertical ascents of the cap’s ice.
And then Prabhat handed me the controller. Let’s go to Mons. The big one, the one I’ve always wanted to see. And it’s pretty simple. We click on a segment of that wonderful levitating Martian globe (after a little quibbling over exactly where Olympus Mons is that reminded me of a family road trip), and up pops the terrain. Suddenly, I’m flying through Valles Marineris, which is 6 times as deep as the Grand Canyon and as wide as the entire continental United States. And then I’m up against the giant cliff scarf that surrounds the base of the mountain.
Up, up, up I go, flying through the nonexistant atmosphere to the top, I plant a little flag in my mind and then take a look around. The view is fantastic, the best on all nine planets. The entire area is covered with mountains. This terrain is actually a massive bugle on the planet’s face. It’s a barren landscape, but there is something in it that suggests life could have once flourished here.
Head sees this program as an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to go to Mars. It’s useful for finding places to investigate. And it’s a good way to give explorers an idea of what they’ll be going. He will even have his Geology 5 class visit the planet’s surface later this semester. One can imagine quite a few inspired future astronauts walking out of class that day.
Strangely, the search for life is driving those collectors of the now-lifeless, geologists, to develop tools such as the CAVE. This is the prelude to a new era in natural history that will look towards other planets. And there they may find answers to some of the questions that still plague scientists about the formation and development of Earth itself.
George Schrege B’03.5 needs a byline.
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13. Tell us (not the writer) briefly what you think the strengths and weaknesses of this piece were.
Thanks for taking the time to fill out this application. We will be contacting you soon about the interview portion. Best of luck and we look forward to meeting with you!