Today marks the end of my internship, and what an experience it has all been! Within the space of ~3 months, I did everything from walking through every single building on River Campus- looking for recycling frames and putting up Shred Fest posters, to getting soaked while putting up “InSTALLments” in the Southside Maisonettes. From struggling with writing my first blog post to co-producing Oscar-worthy 60 Second Sustainability videos (Great job Alyssa!). Let’s just say it’s been an eventful summer.
If there is one thing that I have taken away from this experience, it’s that “sustainability work” (for lack of a better description) is tiring, but rewarding. I honestly lost count of the number of times I had to send out follow up emails, or call people only to reach their voicemails. In fact, I still haven’t heard back from some of the people I reached out to months ago. Nonetheless, most of the hard work that was put into this internship definitely paid off. Among other things, we now have a “Green Office Guide” of sorts- a document that will hopefully enable office employees to be more sustainable in their workplaces. We successfully organized and ran the annual Shred Fest event, where we collected and shredded over 18,000 pounds of paper! We also have more recycling posters/signage and bins posted around River Campus and, we received a generous donation of children’s books that will enable us to restock our 3 Little Free Libraries (1, 2, 3) for the next few months (Thank you Brighton Memorial Library!)
To end it all, I’d like to say a big thank you to Amy Kadrie (the University’s Sustainability Coordinator), for keeping me busy all summer and for organizing this amazing opportunity. Thank you to everyone I worked with in Support Opps. particularly Jefvern White and Pat Beaumont, Professor Karen Berger for sharing this opportunity, and last but not least, Alyssa Lemire- my partner in sustainability. It’s been an awesome time and I have learned so much in the last 3 months. I look forward to learning more about sustainability, and promoting sustainable practices wherever I go.
Until Next time…
Written by Adil Nyambasha, Class of 2018
Photo Credit: Amy Kadrie.