Oxford’s first international sustainability interns
04 Aug 08
Alex Readford
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Ideas on sustainability from America and Australia have been brought to Oxford by two students taking part in the first year of a Sustainability Fellowship intern programme at Oxford University. Their six-week stay has provided them with plenty of ideas from the work and research here to take back home with them.
MJ Truong from Yale University and Alex Readford from Australia National University are the first International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) Sustainability Fellowship interns to visit Oxford and have been working with the University’s Estates Directorate.
Alex has been setting up energy exception reporting, generating automatic reports to building managers about the energy consumption of their sites and helping manage the systems better by looking at any patterns in energy usage.
‘It really comes down to the practical measures you can put in place and I came to get a bit of hands on experience of campus sustainability,' said Alex at the end of his stay. ‘It’s been great for the transfer of ideas between universities.’
The interns also had the opportunity to attend conferences and seminars with their colleagues in the Estates Directorate and Alex appreciated hearing from private enterprises and the UK Government too: ‘You are at a different stage in terms of moving towards sustainability here than in Australia and it’s been great to see how people have approached problems that not just our university, but our country too, will come up against in the future.’
Alex Readford, Australia National University...it’s been great to see how people have approached problems that not just our university, but our country too, will come up against in the future.
MJ spent a lot of her time getting to grips with the many different sustainability projects being undertaken in Oxford and designing a website to bring together information on the range of environmental groups, initiatives and academic endeavours at the university. As well as providing a central point for links to the different projects, MJ hopes it will be used to create a social network for staff to exchange information and ideas about sustainability efforts throughout the university.
MJ said she would definitely recommend the internship when she returns to America: 'It was great to be learning about sustainability in a different atmosphere and seeing how different methods here could help improve sustainability at Yale, and vice versa’.
The interns enjoyed their stay at Merton College and took advantage of being in Oxford, exploring local attractions such as the museums and the University’s Botanic Gardens, as well as travelling further afield to Bath and London.
The IARU is an alliance of ten of the world’s leading research universities and the IARU student sustainability fellowship intern programme is designed to give students the opportunity to work on campus sustainability at different universities.
Two Oxford students have been taking part in IARU Sustainability Fellowships this summer, one at Yale and the other at ANU.