“Environmental Studies, Public Policy, Political Science are a lot of my interests. It kind of started with Marine Science and it’s focused in on water health in my community, but that general area where policy meets the environment is where I’m looking,” Molly Seidel ‘24 said, who has been volunteering for many years and has a strong passion for thinking about society and the world as a whole and helping improve the environment in the future. During one of her favorite classes at Blake, Morality and Modern World, Seidel pointed out that she loved that she could “think about the world as a whole and the meaning behind everything that we do as a society.”
Throughout the past couple of years, Seidel has participated in internships, volunteered in communities, and received social media experience. One internship Seidel was part of was with Kjirsten Walt-Anderson working at an organization called Cetos. “It’s a national nonprofit focused on marine conservation and education,” Seidel said. During her Freshman year, Seidel told Will Bohrnsen, Upper School Science teacher, that she was interested in Marine Science, so he referred her to Anderson. Seidel began working with her as an intern, and has continued for the past four years. Not only that this was her first professional role, but this nonprofit also assisted in growing her passion for water conservation. Seidel also explained that this role assisted in learning “how to reach out in the community to gain attention for a problem.”
Seidel was also able to learn from running the Instagram for Cetos as well as the Facebook for Stop Over Salting, another organization she was a part of. Seidel explained the benefits of running the social media accounts, “[There was] a lot of responsibility with it because obviously, my posts were representing an entire organization. So I think I learned a lot through that as well as just like how to try and gather the most attention for a professional post.”
Stop Over Salting is a community organization based in the Twin Cities and Edina that Seidel was a part of. She explained that they are focused on chloride in the community, especially due to the road salt that is used during the snowy seasons. She began working with this organization before last summer began and continues to work with them today. Their main goal is working on “limited liability legislation and then also just community awareness for this problem [polluted waterways and hurting the environment].” This organization allowed Seidel to find her passion for water health, “I think that their work with the legislation in Minnesota really inspired me and brought in that Morality of the Modern World class just with ethics and law, and I think that that really focused in on how I want to help the environment in the future.”
Over the summer, Seidel spent a lot of her time volunteering at Nine Mile Creek Watershed, maintaining rain gardens for the public schools in her area. While helping the watershed, Seidel mentions that this volunteer opportunity was “a really cool experience because the Nine Mile Creek Watershed is a lot hands-on.”
During all of her volunteering, Seidel gained experience working with people of many ages. Everyone around her was way older than high school age. She said that her coworkers were very “wise” and were interested in her and what she was doing due to her age. She has also had countless amazing mentors, helping and providing opportunities to further her interests. After being surrounded by older people all around her, Seidel commented on the age of the volunteers, “I think that our generation should definitely be focusing on local water health because it’s really really important.”
