When I announced we’d be having a few interns (er, “microinterns”) this summer, I could not have guessed the response: 166 applicants from six countries, a huge swath of them terrific. It was a long battle winnowing their number down — and I ended up taking more than I’d expected — but these seven won out:

— Michael Andersen, a Grinnell and Northwestern j-school grad who writes for The Columbian in suburban Portland;

— Lois Beckett, a Harvard senior studying at Trinity College Cambridge this summer;

— Ben Cohen, a senior at Duke currently interning at the sports blog Deadspin;

— Ian Crouch, a Duke graduate currently getting a master’s in journalism at NYU and who just completed an internship at Slate;

— Haley Sweetland Edwards, a Yale and Columbia j-school grad who formerly worked as a reporter at The Seattle Times;

— Ernesto Priego, a Mexico City native currently pursuing a Ph.D. in information studies at University College London; and

— Jessica Roy, an undergraduate at NYU majoring in new media and journalism.

You’ve already read some of their work over the past week; you’ll see a lot more of them in the coming weeks and months. My sincere regrets to all the other qualified folks I had to turn away. (On the plus side, we’re hoping to have another round of interns in the fall, if all goes well.)