Four children who were using combustible materials in a chemistry experiment at a Northwest Washington elementary school were injured yesterday morning, two of them critically, when the materials exploded.

Stewart P. Ugelow, an 11-year-old sixth grader at Murch Elementary School in Northwest was the District of Columbia winner of the 1987 Kentucky Fried Chicken/Good Housekeeping “All American Salute to Mothers” national Mother’s Day greeting card contest.

It’s hard not to be scared when you’re being “medevacked” to a hospital with another child next to you screaming and a paramedic telling you not to move.

So, watch out, professional publishers. Among the competitors you should be watching are a bunch of college students willing to work for nothing, drawing on the talents of new-media-savvy friends and colleagues around the world. It’s just this kind of venture, created on a shoestring but the result rivaling professional publishers’ products, that the Internet is all about.

In a high-level form of corporate recruiting, US West announced Thursday that it is acquiring a 35 percent stake in Student.Net Publishing - the largely self-financed publisher of college-interest Web content run by a group of Yale and Columbia undergraduates. The deal represents the sixth Internet content partnership that the telecommunications giant has formed since last summer.

Denver’s main telecommunications company, U S West Inc., recently cut a seven-figure check for 21-year-old Yale senior Stewart Ugelow — a former summer intern at this newspaper — for a 35% stake in his Internet Web site, which publishes news-feature stories and data such as TV and concert listings for college students. Student.Net Publishing LLC is less than two years old, and none of its six founders has any prior business experience. “We don’t have anybody on staff yet old enough to rent a car. That’s one of our goals for our next hire,” Mr. Ugelow says.

That old Web rags-to-riches story - in which young webmasters toil at night for no pay and then greet a pile of corporate cash at the end of the tunnel - rings true again, this time in the offices of Student.net. With an investment from US West phone and cable company, the student-run site has gone pro and needs a designer to give it a visual punch on a daily basis.

STEWART UGELOW
Yale University
Along with five partners at Yale and Columbia in the fall of 1995, Ugelow started Student.Net Publishing, an online service that provides student-written articles, television listings, a dating service and a guide to student home pages. In March, U S West bought a 35 percent stake in the company.

Stewart Ugelow, the 22-year-old co-founder of the Web site Student.net, could win the “most unwired” award.