For some AU students, the trendy internship this summer is not on Capitol Hill, at the White House, or even an NGO: it is on a farm.
However, this interest in tilling and planting did not come to fruition for some AU students who considered it.
Seth Shammon, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is one AU student who seriously contemplated a farming internship this summer but did not get one, he said.
He said the idea originally seemed appealing because he desired the self-sufficiency that comes with working on a farm, he said.
"[I] thought that productive manual labor would be personally fulfilling ... I do love nature and the outdoors," Shammon said.
But the Thoreau-like dream would not come true for this philosophy and physics major. Shammon instead chose to pursue more lucrative pastimes this summer to prepare for the expenses of the academic year ahead, he said.
"I decided not to work on a farm because although I would have ... likely gained a lot from the experience, I would not have made any money doing so," Shammon said.
While the agricultural experience did not become a reality for Shammon, former AU student Rafik Salama did have the opportunity to work with the land last summer before transferring to Brown for his sophomore year - but he was not on American soil.
Through a program called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF), Salama learned of two self-sustainable farms in central France where he ended up working last summer after his freshman year at AU, he said.
While at AU, Salama, like Shammon, was studying for a physics and philosophy double-major in CAS. Salama's employment last summer was at Under the Lime Tree and Chateau Ribagnac, two small inns that serve guests home-grown foods.
Both locations follow environmentally sustainable agricultural practices, according to Salama, who pursued this experience in order to act upon his passion for growing and subsisting off of locally grown food.
Salama, who will be a junior in the fall at Brown University, now knows how to make his own preserves and cure his own meats - skills he learned by working in France, he said.
Taking to the fields for the summer has become popular for college students nationwide, according to a recent New York Times article. The number of college students applying for summer farm work has more than doubled since 2003, the Times reported.
The supply of these internships has increased along with demand; the number of farms seeking internship applicants has tripled in the past two years, the Times reported.
But of the 13,000 jobs listed on the AU Career Center Web site, AUCareerWeb, only 38 are related to agriculture, according to David Fletcher, the adviser for undergraduate students in the School of International Service.
"It's a very small percentage," Fletcher said.
In fact, the most frequently listed farm-related internship opportunity on AUCareerWeb asks not for skills in weeding and fertilizing, but in public communications, according to Fletcher.
"These places are doing a lot of outreach," said Fletcher, listing the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation, the National Farmers' Union, and others on AUCareerWeb. "There's a definite pattern there. They're looking for advocacy ... looking to influence voters and lawmakers," he said.
AUCareerWeb does not offer many opportunities for students to get their hands dirty, but this reflects AU students' disinterest in those options, Fletcher said.
"There's a real disconnect because these are tough places to find student interest," Fletcher said. "Most students interested in policy do not choose a PR major, and most PR students are not interested in farms."
An extremely small number of students go to the AU Career Center asking for farming internships, according to Fletcher.
"I have been an adviser for Kogod and now SIS, and I can't say I've had students approach me looking for it," he said.
While future farmers at AU do not frequent the AU Career Center, in Shammon's and Salama's cases, that was a matter of personal preference.
"The AU Career Center was not at all involved in my planning for the summer," Shammon said in an e-mail interview.
Salama also denied any involvement of the AU Career Center in his choice to work on a farm last summer.
"I don't really think in terms of careers, so classifying the trip as career-related is something I would tend to avoid," he said in an e-mail.
You can reach this staff writer at mfowler@theeagleonline.com.
