Thornton ’21 and Cloherty ’21 intern with Seaside Sustainability

While this often-times remote world has its challenges for undergraduate students at Salve Regina, both Isabel Thornton ’21 and Anna Cloherty ’21 were able to experience incredible remote internship opportunities in the fall of 2020.

Both students interned through an organization called Seaside Sustainability, a nonprofit organization based in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Seaside’s mission is to protect and restore coastal waters through education and action, and it hires interns from all around the world in order to make its mission a reality.

These two students share their story below.

Remote internship with Seaside Sustainability

During its internships, Seaside Sustainability encourages project-based learning opportunities so students can educate themselves around environmental issues while working towards a more sustainable future.

When Thornton — who is a double major in English communications and English literature — saw this internship, she knew it was the perfect role for her, as she is passionate about raising awareness about the climate crisis.

Isabel Thornton ’21

“It provided me with an opportunity to cross my passion for communications with my passion for sustainability,” she described. “I was especially excited because I saw that I could work in social media, and that is the field I want to enter after graduation. Seaside Sustainability is also a New England organization, so it felt good to know I could make a positive impact on a local community.”

Cloherty, an English communications major with a marketing minor, actually grew up in the neighboring town of Rockport, Massachusetts. She agreed with Thornton that the local aspect of the internship was amazing, even though it was still a remote experience.

“The ocean and beaches are something that are really important to me,” Cloherty said. “This internship gave me the opportunity to give back to the community that I had the pleasure of growing up in.”

Seaside Sustainability give interns an ability to learn, lead

Both students had different roles during their internships, and the learning opportunities were endless.

During her internship, Cloherty was the project manager of the operations, analytics and platform management team, where she oversaw around seven interns and ensured that projects were completed in a timely manner. She also oversaw the organization’s website.

Cloherty led weekly meetings with board members, wrote around ten articles for Seaside’s blog, transferred Seaside’s email platform from MailChimp to MailerLite, created email marketing templates, designed webpages and made how-to guides for the next cohort of interns.

Anna Cloherty ’21

A photo of a blog post that Cloherty wrote during her internship.

“One of the biggest projects I took part in was the launch of Seaside’s online store,” she explained. “My job was to ensure functionality of the web store on Seaside’s website. I was a huge undertaking to do in only a few months, but we pulled it off.”

Thornton’s main role for the majority of her internship was project manager of the content generation and community management team, as well as the newsletter lead. She made sure all content was well-managed across the entire team. Thornton wrote blog posts, created posts for all of Seaside Sustainability’s social media accounts and worked on a content calendar for scheduling — among many other things.

“I learned how to lead an entire team,” she said. “I also had amazing mentors who are both members of Seaside Sustainability’s board of directors. They taught me how to be a leader and what needed to be done in order to create a positive, successful image of the organization.”

Impacting the world through their internship experiences

Both students loved how meaningful the experience felt when the fall semester was over, and the mentors they had at Seaside Sustainability taught them even more about how to be successful leaders. They both are also grateful that Salve Regina offers opportunities for experiences like this during their undergraduate education.

But even more importantly for them, their internships actually had a real-world impact that they could tangibly see — all while being remote.

Thornton meets remotely with her supervisor during her internship at Seaside Sustainability.

“All the work I did benefited our environment,” said Cloherty. “At Seaside, I worked with a countless number of passionate folks whose goal was to make our future a little bit brighter. It made me realize that I was a part of something bigger than just an internship I needed for credit.”

Salve Spotlights is a series of people-centered stories periodically featured on SALVEtoday. Check out the tag Salve Spotlights for more stories.