Intern Spotlight: Meet Tess

by Tess Klingenstein, Spring 2014 Intern

I like languages. That’s not to say that I have a good ear for them. In the same way that I struggle with tone deafness and staying on key when I sing karaoke, I have a hard time hearing and repeating foreign phrases. It’s why I took Latin in high school and why I enrolled in an American Sign Language (ASL) course my first semester at Tufts University. But eventually I decided to grab the bull by the horns and study abroad in Chile. With four semesters of Spanish under my belt, I familiarized myself (albeit clumsily) with the city of Santiago. The owner of the fruit shop next to my house thought I couldn’t do basic math because I couldn’t understand his accent when he tallied my total. My anthropology professor, my watercolor teacher and my kickboxing instructor all assumed my knowledge or skill set was deficient. Really, I just lacked the vocabulary for ethnocentricity, or fan brush, or roundhouse kick. But six months later I returned home with improved Spanish and a heightened appreciation for being able to communicate in my native tongue.

I am impressed by anyone who has a great mastery of a language, even their own. W. Somerset Maugham, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Brontë, Sylvia Plath—people who are able to communicate the subtlest feelings and the most poignant messages through works of fiction—are some of the people I most admire. Those are the people who draw me to the field of publishing. When I’m not writing blog posts or doing editorial work at PSG, I’m at the Tufts Tisch Library, finishing up a short story for my creative writing class or drafting an essay on James Joyce’s representation of the body in Ulysses. Sundays, I work as a concessionist at a small local movie theater, where I get my fill of movies, new and old, and try not to eat all the popcorn. The majority of my weekends are spent catching up on Parks and Recreation and The Mindy Project, and singing along (off-key) to Taylor Swift while I cook vegetarian fajitas. (I am not vegetarian, but I only know how to cook one thing, and that’s vegetarian fajitas.)

I’m interested in film and television, literature and fiction writing, speech pathology, and working with children. I once read somewhere that people of my generation are projected to have between seven and nine different careers. It would be great if that were true, because there are a lot of different avenues that I would like to explore.

Little-Known Facts About Tess

Tess is known around the office for her subtle wit and upbeat personality, but is known at home for her delicious pie crust abilities. You can find her dishing out pies to one of her 50 maternal cousins, or, if you’re an MTV fan, may catch a glimpse of her in the background of an episode of The Real World: Washington DC.

Tess has also had her fair share of interesting summers. One she spent as the only hearing counselor at an ASL camp. This summer, she will be interning on an island off the coast of Washington State, where she is confident that she will have an amazing time.