Douglas M. Brown '63 Alumni Council Capital District Internship Fund

In summer 2025, I interned at the Adirondack Center for Writing, a non-profit organization whose mission is to make the literary arts more accessible to everyone in the Adirondack region of New York State.

It was the ACW's mission that made me interested in working there. Working as a journalist, as I did in summer 2024, often meant I was expressing others voices through my own words. In summer 2025, I wanted to help and inspire others to express their voices for themselves.

I became drawn into the world of sustainable agriculture when I began realizing where my food was coming from. I never gave it a second thought until I recognized the meat I was eating came from a CAFO (confined feeding operation) where animals were pumped with antibiotics and didn't have room to walk, and the vegetables were probably already weeks old, covered in pesticides and chemicals. As I dug more into the realm of agriculture I wondered how a system that’s supposed to ‘feed the world’ is inherently making us all sick.

Seth worked as a dental assistant at McSweeney Orthodontics over the Summer of 2023. He was enrolled in a dental assistant course to be able to learn and work as a dental assistant. Seth learned and performed many dental and orthodontic techniques such as pano and ceph x-rays, impressions, changing wires, assisting in putting on light force, direct brackets, indirect brackets, and invisalign, and performing sterilization. Seth got the opportunity to become a part of the McSweeney Orthodontics team who sees around 65 patients a day.

I went to Northern Virginia for 8 weeks to help manage a lavender farm. I was able to expand my crop knowledge to lavender and use the preexisting knowledge that I had. I helped improve propagation and the soil on the farm. Besides harvesting and growing lavender, I had the experience of making my own lavender products such as essential oils, sachets, and hydrosol.