The Amazing Adventures Of Supergrad

Even worse, if the students don't enjoy their summer, they may blog about it. Employers are terrified of the intern who felt that he or she had a bad summer and doesn't care if all of MySpace knows it. "They will go into Facebook or any medium and tell the world exactly what they thought," says Sarah Quarterman, global head of campus recruiting for Merrill Lynch. "Their ability to viral-

market the organization is significant." And that can be very good for branding -- or very bad.

"BREAK THE CYCLE OF DISEASE AND POVERTY," Emma Clippinger urges the JPMorgan judges, who are sitting at a table before her. Their money, she tells them, would go toward seeds, manure, tools -- the essentials of cultivating a healthy diet. It would literally be seed money to grow this project, which Clippinger and Morell founded after interning with the Clinton Foundation's HIV/AIDS project and noticing that the antiretroviral medications being distributed by Western nations weren't working as well as they should because the Rwandan patients were so malnourished. They set about addressing the root of the problem by founding community gardens to diversify patients' diets. Gardens of Health has a tiny budget of just over $50,000, and so, Clippinger points out astutely, the bank's contribution would constitute a whopping 50 percent increase.

"This is a low-cost and eminently scalable project," Clippinger tells them. Then she fields questions from the judges, who, being bankers, are looking for certain fiduciary qualities. To win the competition, a project must promise a "social return on investment," which is to say, it must make the world better in a cost-effective, sustainable manner. So, one of the bankers has a question: Could the program ever become self-supporting?

It could, Clippinger replies. Her team of four, which includes two other women from Yale, hopes that someday the growers could sell some of their produce, yielding income to help the program finance itself. She acknowledges that there are many obstacles: Rwanda is a landlocked country with few easy sources of transport, and materials, including manure, are expensive. There is another fairly obvious matter. Rwanda, which suffered a genocidal conflict in the 1990s, is "a most unstable country," points out one judge. Would an investment be safe? In fact, are the women safe when they travel there?

The Gardens for Health team hastens to allay these concerns, explaining that despite the horrors of the recent past, a surprising degree of stability has taken hold. If anything, the country now is a model of overactive bureaucracy. "I've traveled a lot" in Africa, Clippinger tells the judges. "You get pulled over in Rwanda and get a ticket for not wearing a seat belt." Morell, unassuming but also straightforward and confident, points out that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof "wrote a great op-ed about misconceptions of Rwanda." Double-teamed by the young women, the judges sit back, appeased if not entirely convinced that Rwanda is, say, France.

"If you had unlimited funding," asks one judge, "what is the biggest obstacle?"

"Land," Clippinger replies. Her three teammates chime in to support her. To observe them is to see how adept this generation is at working in teams, a skilled prized by employers, who say the world has become too complex, global networks too demanding, for solitary effort. In Rwanda, the women explain, most land is owned by the government, which was skeptical about giving plots to people with AIDS. But Clippinger and Morrell met with several government ministries and got Rwandan officials onboard.

What if the country suffers from a 10-year blight? one judge asks.

"If something happens, we're not pulling out," Clippinger assures him. "These are vulnerable people."

With that, the women sit down and listen to the other teams, whose presentations are equally smooth, their PowerPoints alive with pie charts and slides and animations, their résumés similarly burnished, their intentions refreshingly noble, their suits, with very few exceptions, black. A team from University College of Dublin is proposing housing and care for the city's homeless addicts. A group of engineers from Columbia University is touting a project to bring hydroelectric power to a corner of rural India. Another team wants to build a generator at a hospital in Gambia. Another proposes to provide housing and support for poor students in Brazil. All of the projects speak to the global orientation of these young adults: With a few exceptions -- a community kitchen maintained by students at Washington and Lee University, a domestic program to empower girls -- the projects are international.

There doesn't seem to be a student in the room who has not traveled abroad. During a break, I ask one woman what countries she has visited, and she hesitates. There are too many to recall offhand.