Sterling Terrain V02 - Flipbook - Page 46
44 | Sterling College
Bridging Theory
& Practice
“I expanded my knowledge of the natural world
in a way that books never will – I lived it.”
-from a 1988 student reflection paper
Written By
Dr. Carol Dickson
What do 840 Sterling graduates and
current students have in common? For
one, each of them has completed an
internship for academic credit through
Sterling. 2021 marked the 40th year
that Sterling students have been working with organizations around the world,
applying their learning to workplace situations. Sometimes these new worlds
are in our backyard, like Riverside Farm
in East Hardwick or Pete’s Greens, and
sometimes across the globe, like the
Husavik Research Center in Iceland,
Wildlife Fund Thailand, or High School
No. 3 in the Lviv region of Ukraine. From
the winter of 1981, when Ken LaBelle
and Barb Sutch interned, respectively, in
the Tonto National Forest in Arizona and
Blue Hills Reservation in Massachusetts,
to the summer of 2022, when Kevin
Robertson completed his internship at
Black Dirt Farm in Stannard, Vermont,
Sterling students have been serving as
important contributors to parks, museums, farms, camps, schools, non-profit
organizations, research institutions, and
more for forty years.
What Is a Sterling Internship?
Not just any internship, Practicum in Environmental Stewardship is a 6-credit
experiential academic experience. Students work full-time for ten weeks, and
at the same time set learning objectives
in collaboration with their supervisors,
reflect on their learning progress in regular written reports, and demonstrate
their learning through a final project that
addresses a need of the organization.
As Jennifer Payne, former Dean of Work,
notes, the program exemplifies the experiential education model.
The goals of Sterling’s internship program are for students to apply their
studies to real-world contexts, to direct
their own learning through a field-based
experience, to experience full-time work
in a field they are considering for future
employment, and to generate fieldbased questions that might inform future study. For many, the internship has
led directly to a senior capstone project
and cultivated career skills. And it has
worked! In a 2011 survey, students and
alums overwhelmingly reported that
the internship helped them explore career options (95.8%), realize their own
strengths and weaknesses as an employee (92%), and gain confidence in
their skills and competencies (92%).
History
The internship program was an integral
part of Sterling’s curriculum from the
beginning of Sterling’s AA degree program in Rural Resource Management.
Inaugurated by the late Steve Wright,
Diane Morgan soon took over the reins
and was Internship Director for a number of years. Diane notes that “Sterling
was unique in that internship was instituted as a for-credit program long
before it became a popular element in
higher education, and that students
did their internship in their second year.