New York Sun Works

In November, I started my internship with New York Sun Works. They are a non-profit that uses urban agriculture, particularly hydroponics and greenhouses, to teach kids about sustainability in New York City.  By coincidence, I got hired over the phone while I was hunkered down in one of the computer labs at school during my department's employer information day.

Three of my classmates walked into the room for the last few minutes of my conversation to take a break from the career-day frenzy. When I got off of the phone after very enthusiastically saying things like, "Yes I can start as soon as you want! I would love to be on board!"

They said "Shit girl! Did you just get hired somewhere?" Thinking I had just gotten hired by one of the employers who were still in the building.

I explained what New York Sun Works is and my classmates congratulated me. Dave remembered that I just gave presentation about hydroponics in our Ecological Engineering for Waste Treatment class. Ding invited me to hang out with him in New York City when I was there for meetings. On a day when we were all stressing out about graduating and finding jobs, they were genuinely happy for me. I feel very lucky to have such supportive classmates.

Right now I'm working with their education programs remotely and am starting to help organize a TEDx Youth Conference at the Manhattan School for Children. It's going to be about sustainable cities and urban agriculture. This school has a greenhouse classroom built by New York Sun Works on its roof!

I feel like I haven't delved that far into my internship yet, but I'm excited to get another opportunity to learn more about communication. Organizing conferences, especially one like this with a whole bunch of speakers, requires finagling logistics and meeting new people, two skills I intend on getting better at. I'm looking forward to seeing how this differs from organizing Farmhack@ESF considering that the audience for this conference is fifth through eighth graders.

The plan is to have three pairs of professionals and a student each give a ten minute presentation on the same topic and then have roundtable discussions with students and professionals about those topics. I'm looking forward to seeing kids empowered to give presentations to their peers. Maybe I'll even get a classmate or two to be a presenter.