When Carolyn Mish scrolled through postings looking for a way to round out her years at UC Santa Cruz, she wasn’t just looking for a line on a resume.
“I didn’t necessarily want to enter and exit Santa Cruz having sort of just taken from the college time,” said Mish, who graduated from UCSC on June 12. “This seemed like a great opportunity for me to invest in the place that I’m living in, its community. This slice of things that I care about, and services that are being provided that are really important.”
That opportunity was an internship writing articles for the Friends of Santa Cruz Public Libraries. Beginning in October 2024, Mish became the organization’s storyteller-in-residence, profiling community figures, covering programs, and documenting a downtown library system in the middle of a historic transformation.
A Linguist Who Loves to Write
Mish arrived at UCSC with an eclectic set of interests and a still-forming sense of direction. She’d applied as a politics major, briefly considered law, and ultimately landed in linguistics — a field she describes as uniquely accessible to newcomers.
“A lot of fields that people study in college, they have prior experience with,” she said. “If you’re a math major, you’ve been taking math for 12 years. But people don’t really know anything about linguistics until they take LING 50 (Introduction to Linguistics).” She took the intro course, loved it, and never looked back.
What drew her in was the field’s breadth: the mathematical logic of semantics, the experimental neuroscience of language in the brain, the cross-cultural questions raised by bilingualism. It was, she found, a subject that accommodated her many interests rather than narrowing them.
But something was missing. In high school, Mish had been editor in chief of her school newspaper. At UCSC, she served as a copy editor for City on a Hill, the student paper. Still, she felt the pull of a more community-rooted kind of writing, something that connected her studies to the place she was living. The Friends internship offered exactly that.
Learning to See the System Behind the Service
Over the course of her internship, Mish conducted interviews across a wide range of Santa Cruz voices: longtime business owners like Joe Ferrara of Atlantis Fantasy World and Larry Pearson of Pacific Cookie Company, community leaders and library advocates, people running programs serving isolated seniors, and figures from the city’s long institutional memory.
What she found, again and again, was the same thing: complexity beneath the commonplace.
“Anywhere you look, whenever something’s going well, or you can take it for granted, there’s a ton of people behind it who, that’s what their everyday is, and they’re investing all their time and energy,” she said.
She described the realization through a slightly offbeat metaphor: a friend’s mother who works in dental technology, whose house is full of trade magazines on innovations most patients never think about. “When you go to the dentist, you’re like, just give me a filling. But there are people whose lifeblood is new innovation, and you need that.”
Libraries, she came to understand, are no different. Government support doesn’t mean stagnation. Community needs shape programming. Volunteer investment keeps services vital. “You have to pay attention and give back to things that you have benefited from,” she said.
A Downtown in Transition
One of the most vivid threads running through Mish’s year was the story of Santa Cruz’s downtown library and affordable housing project — a major civic undertaking that, when she arrived, many residents didn’t even know was happening.
By the time she finished her internship, construction on the massive new civic building was visibly underway, its second floor already being poured, the downtown skyline beginning to shift.
Her interviews also gave her an unexpected window into the city’s deeper history. Conversations with people like Ferrara and Pearson kept circling back to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the long process of rebuilding Pacific Avenue that followed. “You’d be surprised how much that comes up,” Mish said.
Pearson, she recalled, had spoken about conversations he’d had with former Santa Cruz mayor Mike Rotkin in the aftermath of the earthquake, about rebuilding downtown together. “Just understanding how really significant events can happen, and they still have impact this much later,” she said. “I feel like we get very wrapped up in COVID, but there was life pre-COVID, and really significant things happened.”
For Mish, who came to Santa Cruz from the Bay Area peninsula as a college student, these conversations were an education in local memory.
“I’m the type of person that reads the plaques downtown, on the buildings,” she said. “But a lot of people, in my experience, don’t know that downtown had to be rebuilt after the earthquake. But it totally did.”
Language, Connection, and What Comes Next
Mish’s time with the Friends also surfaced an unexpected skill. She became, she says, something of a practitioner of intergenerational conversation. Covering programs serving isolated seniors, interviewing business owners and civic figures, she regularly spoke by phone with people who couldn’t meet online. And she found she loved it.
“I’ve made and answered a lot of phone calls with people who wouldn’t hop on a Zoom, or I wouldn’t be available in person,” she said. “I finish all my questions, but we just keep having a little conversation. And I think that’s fulfilling.”
That instinct toward connection is, not coincidentally, at the heart of where she’s headed next. After a summer studying Spanish immersion in Spain, Mish plans to return to California and pursue a master’s degree in communication sciences and disorders, with the goal of becoming a bilingual speech-language pathologist.
The bilingual piece matters deeply to her. “If you can only receive services in English, and that’s not your first language, then how’s that going to work?” she said. “There’s a really astonishing lack of support there.”
It’s a path that, in retrospect, her linguistics degree was always pointing toward. And one that her time with the Friends seemed to clarify. The skills of a good journalist, she discovered, aren’t far from the skills of a good clinician: listening carefully, asking questions, making people feel heard.
“A Slice of Things I Care About”
When asked what she’ll carry from this year, Mish keeps coming back to perspective and the ability to look at services that aren’t necessarily for you and still recognize them as vital.
“Part of college is realizing that not everyone is undergoing the same experience as you,” she said. “Your experience is not universal. Being able to look at things with a lens, not just focus on your own experiences. That’s a big part of it.”
For a linguistics student who arrived at UCSC already curious about language, community, and the structures that hold people together, writing for the Friends turned out to be a kind of fieldwork — one that happened to take place not in a lab, but in the neighborhoods, storefronts, and library branches of a city she came to love.
She expects to be back someday. “I love the intersection of the woods and the beach,” she said. “I could definitely see myself in Santa Cruz in the future.”
The library system and larger community will be glad to have her.
Carolyn Mish served as a writing intern for the Friends of Santa Cruz Public Libraries from October 2024 through January 2026. She graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in linguistics.
