Student Profiles

Alexandria Brown, EHU Minor

Class of 2018

Growing up, environmental subjects were rarely discussed. When I came to college, I never expected for my English degree program to contain anything more than the chronological journey from Chaucer to authors like Hemingway. I took my first environmental humanities course my sophomore year and my English major took a considerable shift that has continued to resonate with me. During sophomore year, I registered for Professor Nadir's course, “Literature, Media, and the Modern Environment.” At first, I found myself ill-equipped to discuss or contribute, but each class discussion revealed that matters of the environment touch each of our lives, regardless of our level of awareness. In this way, there was always another side of the environmental prism to learn.

I appreciated that we were reading pieces that took complex environmental theory and placed them in fictional and journalistic narratives that informed and educated me. So much of the environmental sciences—sciences in general—tends to be relegated to academic audiences who only make up a small subset of everyone affected by the symptomatic phenomena of climate change. Many times, it is not in a lexicon that is easily understood. The ways we analyzed the texts emphasized how important access to information was in expanding the discussion. It was what pushed me to consider a career in the journalism industry in the first place. There is a need for more investigative and informed work on climate change, and how the symptoms spread, especially within our most vulnerable communities.

It’s been a meticulous journey, but since my sophomore year I have fostered my interest in journalism through attaining a blogging position at The Washington Center as well as keeping a blog of my own. While completing my internship, I was tasked with writing a Forbes article about a social entrepreneur who was sustaining an $18 million water fund in South America. As I'm entering my senior year, I have set my sights on news organizations that could open the door for me to practice investigative work that will touch on themes of environmental justice and solutions.