COA Alumni

18

I usually tell people I am from the US South; I spent time in Oklahoma, Texas, and Atlanta. I am currently living in Bar Harbor.

I never spent a summer living on MDI during my time as a student, so I decided to stick around
for a bit after graduation. I worked as a server at the Burning Tree - a vegan working at a
seafood restaurant. I also trained with a group of co-workers from the restaurant to run the
MDI Half Marathon.

I began to develop my senior project by going to global negotiations and hearing from some of the most radical members of civil society, largely in the global South. They were saying ‘we need an energy transition very soon’ and I wondered what that would look like in the context of Texas. I have a lot of family history that is so entrenched in these old kinds of energy and unjust forms of energy, so I wanted to go into the heartland of the fossil fuel industry and into this very conservative culture and think how something just and sustainable could come out of this, and how people perceive the idea of that happening. How does a place like Texas get off of fossil fuels?

Earth in Brackets was much more than just an extra-curricular experience. I traveled to Paris for the United Nations Climate Negotiations in my second year at COA - my first time out of the country. I bonded with my peers through the personal interactions we formed in Paris while tackling negotiations, joining demonstrations, and being strategic in our call for more radical change and justice. Students trained and taught one another how to articulate and organize around the issues. Peer-to-peer education and all having some ownership over the functioning of the group - that keeps people more motivated.

I came to the college because I was looking for a program that allowed for a lot of student autonomy and I was really attracted to the kind of experimental coursework I saw going on at COA.