Learning for a Greener Future: Week 5

By Jacob Herrup, Intern Leader

The Learning for a Greener Future internship is a six-week program offered by Phipps to Pittsburgh-area high school students. Jacob Herrup completed the internship last summer and has returned this year as the Intern Leader. In this blog he will document the interns’ weekly experiences and add in a few interesting facts along the way!

The Learning for a Greener Future internship is a six-week program offered by Phipps to Pittsburgh-area high school students.  Jacob Herrup completed the internship last summer and has returned this year as the Intern Leader.  In this blog he will document the interns’ weekly experiences and add in a few interesting facts along the way!

We are unfortunately heading towards the end of our internship rather quickly. However in this transition into the last 2 weeks we began discussion on real application of what we’ve learned with our time at Phipps Conservatory. This week’s topic happens to be green careers, and thus the aspect of working in the roles we’ve interned in is the prime focus. This started off with our second time shadowing a member of the horticulture staff, followed by shadowing professionals in other departments, which we matched up with based on our displayed interests throughout the internship. The next day was our final field trip for the summer (really more of an excursion), where we took a tour of the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. This ties in with us interns looking towards our futures and what we want to do to make a change in this world. After the tour we went for lunch at Porch, a sustainable restaurant in Oakland near Pitt campus. There we got to tour the rooftop garden they have installed, and we saw how local businesses were taking sustainability into their own hands, while providing top quality ingredients for the customers!

After being surrounded by the idea of college life and life beyond high school, we took a few steps back by working with children from one of Phipps’ summer camps. We assisted Jennifer Torrance, Research and Science Education Facilitator and explored with her mini crew through Phipps’ rooftop edible garden, drawing pictures of the plants we saw and showing them that it can be fun to interact with the natural world! Then once more, we were brought back into discussion of the future with the Green Career Panel held in the CSL classroom. All five speakers had significant knowledge and experience to share with us – of their successes, their failures, and the journey there. To be frank it was extremely moving. Several panelists came from very rough backgrounds, and despite these hardships they have acquired many skills which they have honed and took with them into very successful careers that are making a difference in the world. I hope we all take from their sense of initiative and lifelong learning to achieve great things in the future. Every one of us can help make this world a better place, and there’s so much we as the youth of a new generation, can do if we have the motivation.

At the end of this week we had our last cooking session with Slow Food Pittsburgh. We made zucchini pasta, which due to popular demand has been part of this program for years. Thankfully, telling by how it turned out, it will continue to be. We followed up this with our final session with professional photographer Doug Oster. We picked our top 10 photos we shot before he arrived, and after evaluating them went through the excruciating procedure of narrowing them down to our top 2. They will be decided on soon, and I hope some of you reading this look forward to seeing them once they are put on display this winter! To compliment the theme of moving forward with our acquired knowledge from the summer, our final week’s focus will be on practical knowledge of applying to, and getting into careers and colleges. It’s hard to say that we’re almost done at Phipps for the summer, but that’s all the more reason to make this last week as meaningful as possible!

This Week’s Tidbits:

• One of the Green Career Panelists, Adam Haritan, has a YouTube channel! It’s called Learn Your Land, and it shares its name with his organization. Both have a focus on teaching people about food and wildlife identification. (Learned from Green Career Panel.)
• Did you know? In Phipps’ 125 years since establishment, many shows have come and gone, and have been redone over time. There’s a large documentation of shows from every year since 1897 right here on the website! (Learned from Joe Reed, Interactive Marketing Manager at Phipps.)
• In the US, people love their big portions of pasta! But did you know that in Italy pasta isn’t the main entrée at all, but rather a small portion part of what is generally a multiple course meal. (Learned from Rosemarie Perla, member of Slow Food Pittsburgh.)