From the Botanic Garden to Costa Rica
麻豆传媒高清 senior Bridget McBride had an internship at the Botanic Garden on campus that led to study abroad in Costa Rica, being a camp counselor in Massachusetts and to her first scientific publication.
In the summer of 2024, as a rising junior, I served as a Public Horticulture Intern at the 麻豆传媒高清 Botanic Garden. As I am an environmental studies major with a particular interest in plants, I felt a strong desire to work with the Botanic Garden and was immediately drawn to the internship on Handshake when I came across its posting. With help from the Career Development Center (CDC) on my application and the support of Lynk funding, I was thrilled to be accepted to the internship.
Throughout the summer, I worked with a passionate team of plant enthusiasts that cared deeply about our experience as interns and young professionals. Botanic Garden staff Tom Clark, Alison Costello and Jessie Blum helped broaden my knowledge of the plant world. Interning with the Botanic Garden expanded my plant identification skills while teaching me how to really listen to the plants I was caring for and their individualized needs. Watering, weeding, transplanting, pruning 鈥 I got up close and personal with plants from distant lands with strange adaptations to unique environments, grateful for the opportunity to work with species that I may never have been able to see in their natural habitats. Our daily responsibilities helped me cultivate a personal connection to these plants and this place, an affiliation I would keep with me throughout my remaining studies and further professional development.
Forging a sense of home in my environment would prove important as I would soon find myself far away from my familiar surroundings. The same summer I completed my internship, with help from Adelia Pope from the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives, I committed to studying abroad with the (SFS) at their Center for Ecological Resilience Studies in Atenas, Costa Rica.
Jumping ahead to January 2025, I found myself on a bus from the San Jos茅 airport to my new campus. I was immediately struck by the wondrous plants making homes in the outdoors that I had previously only seen under the careful cultivation in greenhouses. Gigantic Monstera deliciosa climbed tropical trees, coffee, cacao and banana trees grew real fruits and bromeliads of every size shared real estate with tree branches. While this Central American landscape was entirely new to me, I already felt a sense of familiarity from my experiences learning about and caring for plants at Mount Holyoke.
While learning about the environmental issues faced by Costa Rica, the impacts felt by its lands and its people and the strategies the nation has implemented to protect their unique ecosystems, I continued to deepen my understanding of the role of plants in environmental resiliency. All the while, I thought back to the many hours I spent caring for the plants at the Botanic Garden, and I knew that I was well on my way to creating a future for myself in which I can work closely with my environment and sustain it in all the ways it sustains me and my communities.
Having a foundational knowledge of, and passion for, environmental issues fostered by my studies and opportunities at Mount Holyoke allowed me to gain more out of my experience in Costa Rica. This was especially apparent as I conducted directed research under the guidance of Gerardo Avalos, director of the SFS center in Costa Rica. Alongside fellow Mount Holyoke student Ciara Duff 鈥26 and a small group of students, we researched the photosynthetic capacities of the tropical dry forest plant Bonellia nervosa to determine why it displayed the unique adaptation of reverse phenology and the implications it could have in the wider field of conservation. To understand all this information, we learned about complex plant biology and ecology that I felt a strong baseline in, remembering the knowledge I gained from my classes at MHC and from working directly with the plants at the Botanic Garden.
Last summer, after my return to the US, I worked as a camp counselor at the Massachusetts Audubon Society鈥檚 . Using the knowledge from my environmental studies courses and study abroad experience, I designed and led nature-based programming for children aged 8-14 in order to encourage greater connection with the outdoors. My team and I taught our campers about agriculture and environmental stewardship through experiential learning activities and lessons 鈥 from invasive plant removal to gardening to overnight camping. The summer felt like the coalescence of each of my own learning and working experiences thus far. Not only did I have the opportunity to care for plants and work directly with my environment, but I could also pass on this knowledge to a group of young nature enthusiasts.
Throughout the summer, I knew I wasn鈥檛 ready to leave behind my time in Costa Rica. In close collaboration with Dr. Avalos and Duff, we worked together to see our final research paper all the way to publication. I felt an immense sense of joy and fulfillment when our , 鈥淔unctional Trait Variation and Reverse Phenology in the Tropical Dry Forest Species Bonellia nervosa,鈥 was finally published in the scientific journal Plants. The combination of my studies at MHC, passion for plants fostered in the Botanic Garden, fieldwork experience in Costa Rica and scientific communication skills as a counselor had come together in this final product. All these experiences taught me the value of collaborating to achieve a common goal to share knowledge 鈥 a true Mount Holyoke perspective that I will carry with me beyond its gates.
