Allison Walsh
Allison Walsh traveled to Ireland, where she completed a nine-week internship in business sales and marketing. Working for Distinct Distribution, a wholesale beauty distributor in Bray, County Wicklow, she learned crucial aspects of good business practices such as how to use worldwide sales software, place customer orders, and how effectively manage a team. Through her internship, Allie was able to learn more about how businesses operate in Ireland and the U.K., where some of her company’s business was from. During her time in Ireland, she stayed in Shankhill, a small town in County Dublin off the coast of the Irish Sea. An hour-long train ride away from the city, Allie spent many afternoons exploring the cultural and historical sites and monuments of Dublin. She was also lucky enough to be able to travel to the northern, western, and southern coasts of the country, and along the way learned a great deal about Irish culture, values, and lifestyles exhibited across the various regions of Ireland. Allie’s time studying abroad was a transformative and life-changing experience. In her internship, she had the ability to deep in her understanding of her field of study and improve upon various professional skills. During her time traveling around the various regions of the country, she developed an appreciation for Irish culture and learned about the turbulent past of the country and how that affects the ways in which Ireland functions today. She made amazing friends along the way and is left with knowledge, stories, and memories that will last a lifetime. Allie is forever indebted to the Vira I. Heinz Program for Global Leadership for providing young women such as herself with the life-changing opportunity to study abroad.
CEE Title: Introducing Sustainability on Campus
Thiel College’s 2022 Cohort’s Community Engagement Experience was titled “Introducing Sustainability on Campus” and aimed to convince administrators to implement more eco-friendly food service options on our campus. Our presentation began with each of us providing a brief presentation about our host country and the sustainability practices that they have instituted. Additionally, we provided photographs of these sustainability practices in action, such as recycling bins, composting bins, wooden cutlery, paper straws, and sustainable housing. As the final part of our introduction, we discussed the reduction of food waste in our host countries, and how their portion and plating size strategies have allowed them to reduce food waste substantially, decreasing their overall waste output.
Throughout our CEE, we emphasized that sustainability is a global effort that is only effective if implemented locally. In order to explain the importance of sustainability and why we should care, Paige Long covered the topic of efficiency, discussing the lifespan of durable materials, the affordability of solar energy, strategies to avoid abundant food waste, and how to reduce carbon footprint on a digital scale. After that, I was responsible for covering the topic of economic feasibility and implementation. In my portion of the presentation, I discussed the financial aspect of switching to sustainable products in our campus dining halls. In doing so, I outlined the cost of the products currently being used and compared them to the price of the sustainable options that we were suggesting. To finish out our CEE, Jasmine Phillips further discussed ways in which sustainable practices can be implemented on campus, discussing additional, cost-effective ways to promote such practices on our campus. Upon concluding our presentation by relating it back to “Think Globally; Act Locally,” we opened the floor for questions and engaged in guided discourse with those in attendance.