Princeton Summer Internship Profile

Caitlin E. McTague ’08, the Arthur Wellman Butler Jr. Memorial Scholar, came to Princeton with plans to continue on to law school. However, her summer internship at Eagle Rock School in Estes Park, Colorado, may have changed her mind. The Student Volunteers Council put her in touch with Robert J. Burkhardt Jr.’62, founder and head of Eagle Rock, an alternative, year-round high-school. Many of the students, says McTague, “have struggled in public schools…..” She served as Eagle Rock’s assistant director of the theater program. Later, while helping to update the school’s (database), she phoned many Eagle Rock alumni—“an illuminating experience. I learned how the school had changed their lives.” McTague says, “Alternative education caught my imagination because I think it is vital for us to look at our public school system, at how many children are slipping through the cracks.” Even as she works on her junior paper in the history department and runs distance events for Princeton women’s track and field, she is thinking ahead. “Whatever I end up doing,” she says, “I am sure I will always be invested in improving public education.”