Karen Cushnie '83 - Kettering Family Foundation Fund

During this internship, I had the opportunity to be involved in working with school management and student life. For school management, I was given tasks such as translating certain documents from Western Armenian to English as well as working on ways in which to improve certain administrative processes such as teacher evaluations, grade organization/digitization, communication with guardians, and student/teacher relationships. 

I was a project manager during my internship and I oversaw the intern project for Sebago Clean Waters in which we delivered three final deliverables. We delivered a PowerPoint presentation template to pitch new business, a story-telling tool, and an influencer deck on how to leverage social media through the use of influencers. In addition to that, we delivered billboard concepts as well as new activation ideas.

Before my public relations internship began, my main goals for the summer included: 

As an intern at the Tijuana River Estuarine Research Reserve, I immensely enjoyed my experience. It was a fantastic opportunity to work in the Coastal Training Department. I had the chance to experience the challenges of working in a binational watershed, especially between two countries that have such a noticeable contrast as the USA and Mexico. Mainly I was involved in the planning and logistics of the Tijuana River Action Month (TRAM) that happens every year.

With the funds I received from the Center for Career Excellence in the form of the Internship Fellowship funding, I was able to support myself in a slightly alternative manner and replace my summer earnings so that I could complete an independent project in the form of research throughout the country of Jordan, located in the Middle East. As a Multi-Language major, I have had the opportunity to learn some of the Arabic language at St. Lawrence, and I found myself drawn to the culture and life that seemed so untouchable.

This past summer, Conor was a Financial Services Intern with Baystate Financial, working with a team of senior advisors to provide retirement planning, education funding strategies, investment management, and insurance products. He was able to learn a plethora of information about the finance industry while "test-driving" a full-time career of a financial planner in such a short time period. A notable amount of time was spent on network outreach via email, phone, etc., with the primary goal being to identify and bring in potential clientele that could benefit from Baystate's services.

Going into this summer experience I had three learning goals for working as a teaching fellow. The first was to improve my leadership skills through further developing my public speaking and listening skills as well as becoming more adaptable and flexible.

Green Mountain Farm-to-School (GMFTS) is an environmental education non-profit that strives to connect local communities in VT with their food system through education and locally sourced, fresh food. The organization has two main focuses: food-based education and delivering healthy foods to its community members through the implementation of a food hub and food truck.

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Prior to starting my nine-week internship, I made three main goals for the summer, which are listed below:

For this project I acted as an assistant to Blair Walsingham, the deputy political director for the Forward Party. The Forward Party is a new political party that's primary focuses are election reform and limiting the amount of polarization in politics. Most of my time was spent building and organizing spreadsheets that tracked the candidates, campaign finance data, and results of the ongoing primary elections in all 50 states across the U.S. I also formulated tweets with the help of Blair, who taught me about the ways political campaigns use social media to maximize their impact.