Isaac Yu ’28 and Alexandra Hofacre ’27 at Stonewall Columbus, where they are interns.
This Pride month, Alexandra Hofacre ’27 and Isaac Yu ’28 are busy picking up meaningful career skills while helping to prepare for one of the largest festivals celebrating the LGBTQ+ community in the United States.
Their work in Columbus — just an hour from campus — is part of a paid internship at Stonewall Columbus that is available to Kenyon students through a new summer program focused on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community.
The donor-funded opportunity also supports a student researcher working with a faculty mentor in Gambier during the summer. Both the internship and research opportunities are open to any current Kenyon student interested in applying.
The goal, according to the donors, is to help students find their passion through undergraduate summer research and experiential learning opportunities while focusing on the LGBTQ+ community — all while taking advantage of the College’s proximity to Columbus.
Yu, a biochemistry major from Seattle, hopes to go to medical school one day and pursue a career serving LGBTQ+ individuals. He’s working with Stonewall Columbus’ operations team to prepare for the nonprofit’s Pride festival and march, the second largest in the Midwest, which is expected to draw more than 700,000 people to the area from June 19-20.
“I thought this would be a really interesting internship to help me with job skills, and also this is the sort of community that I'm interested in working with as a medical professional in the future,” he said.
Hofacre, an English major from the Washington, D.C., area, works in the organization’s advancement office, assisting with social media, graphic design, video editing and other marketing efforts. “I'm definitely picking up a lot of new skills,” she said. “I’ve seen myself grow.”
This is Hofacre’s second Kenyon-exclusive internship — one of more than 30 now available to students through the Career Development Office. Last summer, she worked for Columbus-based Milestone Marketing, owned by Kristen Orlando-Ricordati ’05. She said she’s excited to build on what she learned there in a new context.
“It felt like everything was lining up because I had thought about volunteering here before,” Hofacre said. “The storytelling aspect has always drawn me to marketing, so I was excited to see how I could apply the skills I had learned before to a nonprofit.”
The students joined an organization with strong Kenyon ties, as its executive director, Densil Porteous, is a member of the Class of 2002 and a former College trustee. “It's really nice to see the connections that Kenyon brings with alumni,” Yu said.
The other half of the new LGBTQ+ program this summer is research being conducted in Gambier by Mara Thomas ’27. They’re studying the topic “Lesbian Politics and Cultural Production in the Women’s Music Movement” with faculty mentor Jessica Pruett, assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies.
Thomas, who is from Cincinnati, is double majoring in gender and sexuality studies and English, with a creative writing concentration. They said they’re looking forward to working with oral histories related to the women's music movement from the 1970s as a prelude to graduate school.
“I really enjoy talking about queer community,” they said. “And that, so many times, revolves around some sort of art or media that people can see themselves in.”
The work is important, they said, and it was easy to jump at the chance to move it forward, work with a talented mentor, and get paid to do it.
“I’d like to pursue more school after Kenyon, so the fact that we could have an opportunity to do research as an undergraduate and have the opportunity to work this closely with faculty sounded like something I wanted to do,” Thomas said.
That’s exactly what the program’s donors — Kenyon parents — had in mind.
“One of the things I love about Kenyon is that there is the opportunity for undergrads to work so closely with faculty and to do research. I’ve seen it with my kids and my kids’ friends that they really had these incredible opportunities,” one of the donors said. “It’s such an amazing thing, having these relationships with faculty and these experiences with research that can be so life-changing.”
In the end, the hope is that these experiences make students better equipped to find meaningful career paths while becoming changemakers.
“I love the idea of trying to support students in figuring out what they’re passionate about,” the donor said. “We strongly believe in education as a tool for good in the world and a tool for social change.”