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When McCallie rising senior Noah Burney was looking for an internship that would build his design portfolio, he went first to Chattanooga's leading integrated design firm, Medium (formerly Coptix Inc.).

"Noah is insanely talented," said Medium President, Josiah Roe. "Based on his work and confidence, we thought he was a in college. When we found out that he was a rising senior in high school, we offered him our summer internship on the spot."

As an integrated design firm, Medium is responsible for designing and developing strategies that leverage the internet as a tool to serve the business goals of its clients. The internship will offer Burney valuable marketplace experience alongside experts in the field, without requiring him to spend the summer months in Atlanta, Nashville or other larger city.

"I am planning to apply to design schools like Pratt Institute, RISD and the University of Illinois at Chicago," said Burney. "An internship really helps my chances of getting into an outstanding program, if it is a quality internship with a talented company. When I looked at the companies in town, Medium's design portfolio was easily the strongest."

To date, Burney has worked on social networking pages for the company, helped with ground-level production on client sites, and has contributed to the development of a new suite of website interface tools Medium will be releasing later in the year. Roe has been so pleased with Burney's work that they are arranging for him to continue the internship part-time during the school year.

"A fundamental shift in the way we think about web design is occurring," said Roe. "Dynamic & forward thinking students like Noah are bringing future possibilities for the internet closer and closer. Our goal is no longer 'the internet on your desktop' but instead 'the internet <i>is</i> your desktop."

Medium, which built its customer base upon technology and web services, has extended its creative and marketing services in recent months and has garnered national media attention through a feature on CBS Sunday Morning, which profiled its redesign of the Chattanooga Times Free Press website. In an April Fool's weekend web marketing experiment, Medium digitally modified a photograph of White House advisor Karl Rove to show him carrying a folder emblazoned with the Coptix logo, bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors to <a href="http://rove.thisismedium.com">http://rove.thisismedium.com</a>, and was featured in national news outlets across the country and in Europe.