Student Fellows Soak Up the Experiences
Summer Highlights from our Sabin Fellows
As summer winds down, we reflect back on the incredible opportunities and experiences our Sabin Fellows pursued from right here in town to 1,500 miles away!
Municipal Sustainability
Three of our Fellows worked in some capacity at the City of Winston-Salem’s Office of Sustainability, while one spent his summer supporting Davie County Public Utilities, providing these students with an opportunity to support their communities while learning more about how local governance and sustainability efforts actually happen.
My work consisted of more office work than I expected…
Owais Kamran’s words expressed a common theme, which was also captured by this snapshot of Adopt-a-Park work provided by Hunter Shanly.
Fellowship Life Lesson #1: Every job has more office work than you’d expect!
Fellows learned that keeping our communities clean and green requires a lot more administrative effort than they realized. That included analyzing waste disposal program results and auditing and updating the Adopt-A-Park records to ensure our public spaces are being stewarded effectively. Understanding, and helping to optimize, the ways in which our city government monitors and executes services from waste composting to water quality helped our Fellows gain an appreciation for all that goes into serving our communities.
Not surprisingly, the Fellows were excited to share some of their more hands-on efforts, including supporting community clean-up events, helping kids discover nature in our local creeks, and nurturing a hydroponics tower that had recently been started by a previous intern.
Hands on Research Farther Afield
Our other Fellows pursued research and work in the field. Lily Scarlett worked with NGO Asekia in Puerto Rico, where she monitored leatherback sea turtle nests and assisted with migratory bird research. Kendall Cosby was also supporting sea turtles, where her work with the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Florida included collecting monofilament at the Juno Beach Pier to reduce its dangerous entanglement threat.
Field research isn’t all sea turtles and beaches, of course! Sabin Fellow Reese Lile worked at the Youngsteadt Urban Ecology Lab at NC State, where she studied the relationship between urban clover patches and the behaviors of bees around Raleigh, North Carolina. Under the supervision of Prof. Crystal Dixon, Orrin Jones conducted community research in Selma, Alabama, as the pair is studying how disaster aid relief is secured and distributed in the American South. While in Selma, Orrin also had an opportunity to intern for Mayor Skip Moss III.
This research held deep personal and historical significance, as it took place in my family’s hometown and included surveying at the historic first Black Baptist church where MLK and John Lewis orchestrated the Selma March.
‒ Orrin Jones
We are incredibly impressed with the breadth and depth of work undertaken by these Sabin Fellows over the course of this summer, and can’t wait to see what they do next.