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| LANA ZAK |
Seeker of Solutions
Lana Zak has been named as one of a handful of American students who are "likely to make a difference." Spend an hour or two with her (if you can keep up) and you'll see why.
It's 1:30 a.m. in the middle of finals week, and Lana Zak is handing out brownies to the surprised, bleary-eyed students, hunched over stacks of books in the student union.
"Hi there!" says Zak, the newly elected president of the UI Student Government, as she hands a student a square of frosted chocolate. "You look like you could use some energy."
He laughs and takes the offered brownie, chatting with Zak for a minute before going back to work, visibly refreshed.
"Sometimes," Zak explains later, "it's the little things that help."
True enough. But Zak, a native of Bettendorf, Iowa, who has an almost supernatural amount of energy, doesn't confine herself to these "little things"--as helpful as they are. One minute, she's passing out brownie pick-me-ups, or establishing a recycling program for her residence hall; the next, she's discussing the details of her plan for an organized international response to large-scale natural disasters.
"With a coordinated framework put into place beforehand," she argues convincingly, "you can save billions of dollars and millions of lives."
Don't let the fact that Zak is barely out of her teens fool you. Her plan for a Global Disaster Information Network grows out of experience, not just classroom knowledge. As an intern working for the State Department in 1998, Zak organized an international conference on the subject. Actually, she was just supposed to help with the conference arrangements. But three days after her internship began, Zak's boss was called out of the country on a diplomatic mission. He dropped the entire project onto her lap. Instead of blanching at the responsibility, her reaction to the change in plans was "Hooray!"
"So many interns get stuck making coffee or copying papers," she explains. "Instead, I was given the opportunity to organize an international conference. It doesn't get better than that."
Well, actually it does. She admits, albeit under pressure, that the State Department conference, as challenging and rewarding as it was, wasn't the highlight of her summer. Even better was the conference she dreamed up on her own and organized in just a few weeks, as part of a Minority Leaders Fellowship she was awarded that summer. Zak, an Asian American, was one of 34 minority students who spent time talking about issues and taking part in various civic projects in Washington.
She recalls a discussion with an African American woman in the program who complained that she was treated differently at the federal judicial building in which she had an internship, simply because of her race.
"And then I realized that there was something I could do about this," Zak says.
What Zak did was to organize a daylong Lawyers of Color Conference, tacked onto an annual meeting held in the nation's capital for prospective law students. The conference, with several panel sessions on a variety of issues, was a tremendous success.
Zak plans to make a career in public service, an ambition that received a boost in March 1999, when she was selected to receive a prestigious Truman Scholarship. The award carries with it a $30,000 stipend to be used for her final undergraduate year and then toward a graduate education.
The scholarship, which is given to just 75 students a year nationally, is granted to students who are "likely to make a difference." That certainly describes Lana Zak, who already has an impressive list of achievements after just three years of college (she serves as a resident assistant in her residence hall, a proctor in the Honors Program, and she organized a clothing drive for refugees from Kosovo).
Looking to the future, Zak manages to be both a hardheaded realist and an optimist.
"There's a world's worth of problems," she admits. Then she smiles and adds, "But there are even more solutions."
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