Ever since she took Professor Mariola’s Sustainable Agriculture class her freshman year, Ellen Baird ’14 (an anthropology major and environmental studies minor from Steubenville, Ohio) has wanted to find a way to work on a farm. Last summer she achieved that goal, interning at North Carolina State’s Center for Environmental Farming Systems with the help of an APEX Fellowship. Ellen’s internship included hands-on farming, a research component, and community outreach through gardening classes. This internship dovetailed with Ellen’s classwork in sustainable agriculture and the environment, and when she came back to school this fall she decided to write her I.S. on the rising number of new and beginning farmers in the United States.
Working on a sustainable agriculture research operation helped Ellen gain a fuller understanding of farming and decide that it is something she wants to continue doing after she leaves Wooster. As a result of her experience, Ellen was recently hired to work as an apprentice on a Pittsburgh farm after graduation. Ellen’s experiences with APEX have been helpful to her goals in a number of ways; she has used resume clinics and career planning resources to make her a strong applicant for internship and jobs, and she could not have afforded to complete her farming internship without APEX funding.
By Madeleine O’Neill ’16