Jenna: Between freshman and sophomore year, we went to Los Angeles and worked for an entertainment manager, Marc Gurvitz, at the Brillstein-Grey agency.

Marc Gurvitz: When a friend called the office and asked, “Do you have any intern spots for the President’s daughter and her friend?” I was expecting it to be a disaster. But these two girls worked hard. There was not one thing they didn’t do, from Xeroxing to picking up other people’s lunches. One night she had to go to a taping of Bill Maher’s show, I said, “I hope you have tough skin; there’ll be jokes about your dad.” She rolled with it.

Jenna: The next summer Mia and I traveled around Eastern Europe. In Prague we took poetry classes at Charles University with (acclaimed poet/playwright/screenwriter) James Ragan, who was head of the graduate professional writing department at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

James Ragan: Jenna began to really think of herself as a writer that summer. I urged her to write about the part of her family that was least known — to go back to that reservoir of experience that had shaped her. She wrote about her mother’s father, and she came up with one magical image about the Texas dust and the wind that “weaves the gray air.” She produced an excellent poem.

At the end of the summer, I left them with this message: “Live poetry — don’t just write it. Go into the world. Become engaged with the lives of the impoverished and find poetry there.”

Although Jenna was a dedicated student, the public had a different impression of her. For years, she and Barbara were the butt of late-night TV jokes and media digs that painted them as hard-partying twins. It didn’t help that in May 2001, they were caught violating Texas’ underage drinking laws, just two weeks after Jenna had entered a no-contest plea for a similar offense.

Jenna: I don’t think I’m portrayed in the media the way I really am — but then who is? People grow and change. I think the people who are open-minded realize I’m human and that people make mistakes, and, if they think of (the underage drinking incident) at all, they think, She was in college — that was seven years ago. If people want to hold on to old images, I can’t let it bother me, but my friends get annoyed.

After graduation, I got a job teaching third- and fifth-grade students at the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. I loved it. A lot of my students had emigrated to the U.S. from Mexico and El Salvador. I really began at that time to think of myself as an educator.

Mia: I moved to New York and became an assistant to Glamour’s photo editor Suzanne Donaldson. It was invaluable, for a fledgling photographer, to see first-hand the process by which editors choose the imagery.

Although we were in different cities, Jenna and I kept up our book-trading. But our tastes had matured. Jenna gave me Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” and I gave her Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore.”

Jenna: I loved Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” and Ann Patchett’s “Truth & Beauty.”

In September 2006, heeding James Ragan’s exhortation to “go into the world,” Mia and Jenna moved to Panama to work as interns for UNICEF’s Latin America and Caribbean office.

Mia: Jenna’s boyfriend was amazing. When she said, “Hey, I’m going to Latin America for nine months,” he was OK with it! She told me, “The way to make a relationship work is having a mate who’s supportive of your passions.”

Jenna: Our UNICEF bosses said, “Mia, you’re a photographer; Jenna, you write. So why don’t you both travel around, take pictures and write about the children we serve. We were sent to Paraguay, Argentina and Jamaica.

Mia: At a conference of women and kids with AIDS and HIV, we saw Ana. (Ana is not her real name; it’s a pseudonym to protect her identity.)

Jenna: She was this absolutely beautiful 17-year-old girl, and she stood up with her baby in her arms and said with great conviction: “I want everyone here to know: We’re living with HIV; we’re not dying of it!” Mia and I were almost in tears.

Mia: Her story was so compelling, so deep. Ana was born HIV positive; her mother and father had both died of AIDS by the time she was in sixth grade. She was sexually abused. She fell in love with a boy, and at 16 had a baby girl, Beatriz (also a pseudonym) — whose HIV status is, so far, fortunately negative.

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