This past semester, I was a rotational intern at the Office of Sustainability. As a rotational intern, I worked on three different initiatives within the Office, including the Cougar Food Pantry, the 71% Project, and Sustainability Week. I worked with each initiative for a month in order to have exposure to each project and complete different tasks.
For the first month, I volunteered at the Cougar Food Pantry, which is a resource for students that battles food insecurity on campus. Many students do not have access to three meals a day, so the food pantry allows students to come shop for different items like pasta, cans of vegetables, cereal, and more. These items are donated by different organizations and students on campus through food drives and competitions. Along with volunteering during the pantry’s open hours, I helped stock these donations and organize the pantry.
Next, I worked with the 71% Project, which focuses on plastic pollution in the oceans. Charleston’s location on the water emphasizes the importance of minimizing usage of plastics and cleaning up litter on the streets, so my main task during this rotation was to organize weekly litter sweeps. Volunteers from the Office of Sustainability, Alliance for Planet Earth, and this class were instrumental in these litter sweeps. We also used the SC Citizen Science app to record the data on how much trash we collected before sorting through the litter.
Lastly, I helped with Sustainability Week, which is an annual collection of events intended to promote the different pillars of sustainability to students and the community. I helped organize events during the week, along with setting up, attending, and tearing down events. My main task was assisting in organizing a Land & Labor Acknowledgement, which acknowledged the indigenous groups that owned this land and their labor that built the College. The event included speakers and performances from members of indigenous groups, such as the Gullah Geechee community, and their words and actions were very enlightening.
I also had the opportunity to volunteer with other organizations on campus through interning with the Office. One of these organizations is the Stone Soup Collective Student Chapter at the College, and I was able to help distribute the soup to students one Wednesday evening. It was very interesting to hear the founder of Stone Soup speak in class last week on her inspiration for the organization and the way it operates outside of campus.
Working as a rotational intern with the Office was a very rewarding experience, as I was exposed to the pillars of sustainability outside of learning about them in this class. Not only did I work within the economic and social pillars with the Cougar Food Pantry and Sustainability Week, but I also experienced the environmental pillar through the 71% Project. At the end of the internship program, we participated in a synthesis module exercise, which tied together these three pillars by defining them and providing examples of issues within the pillars, such as greenwashing. We also discussed topics we covered in class, like the Anthropocene, points of intervention, types of capital, externalities, and more.
My experience as an intern with the Office of Sustainability was a very positive one, and it exposed me to aspects of sustainability outside of just learning about them. I was able to apply much of the knowledge from this class to take-aways from events and conversations with other interns. I highly recommend applying for an internship with the Office in the future because they are a great resource on campus and an amazing way to become more involved and expand your consciousness. 