An IOP staffer offered to send her resume to WHP anyway, and he included her thesis thinking the organization would be interested.

A few days later, WHP Executive Director Beverly Neufeld called Shames to offer her the group’s top research position.

“With her thesis work, [Shames] was a perfect match with the White House Project,” Neufeld said.

In her new position, Shames is analyzing the gender of guests on Sunday political talk shows over the past two years and looking for the images and messages of female candidates that work best in campaign ads.

“I fell in love with the project,” she says, “and decided this was what I really wanted to do.”

Screenwriting from Harvard

When Todd B. Kessler ’94 was a sophomore, he asked the English department if he write a play for his senior thesis.

The department said no—this was before creative theses was offered an option to concentrators—and Kessler transferred to the special concentrations department so he could write a play after all.

That play would earn him a stint with Spike Lee and set him on the path to becoming a professional screenwriter.

Kessler’s play, Darlene, premiered in the Loeb Experimental Theater in December of his senior year.

That same year also marked the third and final time that Spike Lee offered a seminar in screenwriting to undergraduates at the College. Kessler took the seminar, and by the time the seminar was over, Lee had offered Kessler a summer internship to work with him in Brooklyn.

The internship was in the development office of Lee’s production company. Kessler would read scripts and then write a detailed summary of whether the projects deserved further attention.

At the end of the summer, Kessler was offered a full-time position in the development office, but he deferred.

“I didn’t want to be reading scripts anymore,” he says. “I wanted to write.”

Then Spike Lee read Kessler’s thesis.