Laurel Salvo loves rock-and-roll

Most student internships tend to involve filing, fetching coffee, and getting glimpses of a desired career. Laurel Salvo spent her fall semester hanging out with Joan Jett.

OK, sometimes that meant going to Starbucks or organizing files for the icon, but hanging out backstage in Atlantic City and watching a photo shoot at a New York recording studio aren't bad perks.

"It was just a chance I took," said Salvo, who saw, and loved, the new Joan Jett flick The Runaways last weekend. "I didn't think it would actually happen!"

Long before Salvo landed that New York gig, the 24-year-old English major at Ursinus College loved music, even the bad '80s kind.

"My parents listened to a lot of Phil Collins and Rod Stewart, but I also listened to a lot of electronic music - the Cure, Depeche Mode," Salvo said.

After all, it was music that helped her get through a rough time in her life when she had not one but two kidney transplants as a teenager - and lots of waiting time on dialysis.

"The thing about music is that any one song can get you out of any moment you're in and take you into something else," she said. "It can elevate you or get you through something rough."

When she started college, Salvo realized she wanted music to be more than a hobby. She was trying to book a band last July when she struck up a telephone conversation with Julie Rader, the vice president of promotions at Blackheart Records Group, an independent label cofounded by Jett. Afterward, Salvo kept in touch.

"I thought she was very together, very organized, and had good follow-up," Rader said. "I deal with a lot of personalities, and she really stood out for me."

Then Rader invited Salvo to an Aug. 5 Jett concert in Bethlehem. Backstage.

"It was really chill, but it was really brief," said Salvo of her meeting with Jett, a Philadelphia native born at Lankenau Hospital. "We mostly talked about Girl in a Coma, the band on her label that I had interviewed for the college."

Ursinus requires some of its students to complete an independent study before graduation - an internship or independent project with a professor, for example. Salvo figured her prospects were poor, but she e-mailed Rader the day after the concert and asked if there might be room for her at Blackheart during the fall 2009 semester. There was.

So every Thursday starting in September and lasting four months, Salvo would take the train from Norristown to Philadelphia and then the bus from 30th Street Station to New York City. She'd work at Blackheart from noon until 6 p.m., sleep over at a New York City hostel, work Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., hostel it again, and come home on Saturday in time for her next week's classes.

It was a lot of effort. It was a lot of time. But it was where she wanted to be, working in a small office at Broadway and Bleecker Street. Salvo organized the file cabinets. She read the fan letters (there were quite a few from prison inmates, she said). And there was "merch," or merchandise, to be cataloged, shipped, and sent all across the world.

She spent one day at the Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, watching Jett lay down tracks for the Runaways movie. She went to the Shore to catch a Jett show and hang out backstage.

And she ran for coffee to help Jett get through a photo shoot.

"There were a couple triple shots of something in there," Salvo said. "It was pretty potent."

Because Jett was on tour, there wasn't a lot of one-on-one time, mostly a "hi" and "bye" walking in and out of the office.

Still, the experience merited getting a Blackheart tattoo (a black heart, of course, with the word "Fetish" across it) on her neck, now one of five that Salvo sports, each marking a milestone in her life.

There's the butterfly, also on the back of her neck, for when she started college, or the treble clef on her forearm for when she decided to focus on music.

But there is no tattoo to mark the end of her kidney surgeries.

"I have scars for that," she said.

Ten years earlier, she had been in the hospital, fighting one infection after another until receiving one transplant at age 16 and another at 19.

It had been a hard time. She had to delay college for a year to undergo the second transplant, spending three days a week on dialysis. She was depressed, suffering 106-degree fevers each night when everyone else her age was picking out classes and going to parties. Her days were spent at the dialysis center, where she would plug the music in her ears and let the lyrics wash over her, words that took her out of the moment.

Those years of struggling aren't something she wears on her sleeve, though. Rader didn't find out until after Salvo was hired.

"It just made me love her even more," Rader said. "I just think that it makes her more determined."

Come sophomore year, Salvo started to feel whole again, filling her time with friends and activities. And these days, her life is quite full, running the college's WVOU radio station and managing a student film festival and the concert planning committee.

"If you have the ability to pursue something you're passionate about, you might as well throw yourself into it," she said. "You don't have anything to lose."

As she looks forward to graduating from Ursinus next month, Salvo has a lot more than a Blackheart hoodie as a souvenir. She holds an insider's look at the workings of an independent label, and she says she'll use that to take on the music world.

For now, she's busy working two jobs, one as a receptionist at the school art museum and the other as desk assistant for campus security, where her father works.

"I don't want to feel idle," she said. "I want to feel like I'm accomplishing stuff because I have the ability to do it all now."