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Voter Registration Drag Shows, Flowers in the Rain, and More

UNC Asheville Students Share their Summer Internship Stories

By UNC Asheville

September 4^th, 2020

Even in the midst of all the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNC Asheville students still found ways to connect with the community through summer internships focused on voter registration, food access and education, and sustainable business. These students challenged themselves to serve, learn, and gain new experience. Learn more about the places they worked and their experiences below:

Sydney Swaim: Democracy NC

Senior political science major Sydney Swaim served as an intern in Democracy NC’s Democracy Summer program, working remotely, while still focused on making connections.

“I was doing local advocacy,” Swaim explained. “A lot of what we did was meet with community leaders and making those connections, staying up to date with what's going on in the community.”

Part of that advocacy included working with the Board of Elections to establish early voting sites at UNC Asheville and the Dr. Wesley Grant Sr. Southside Center.

Voter Registration Drag Shows, Flowers in the Rain, and More

“The Grant Center has the highest turnout of Black voters, and UNC Asheville has the highest rank of young voters and they weren't going to to include those sites,” Swaim said. “So we organized an advocacy campaign, we had people attending the Board of Elections meetings and we got we got those things. That was awesome.

“If you think about, if nobody's doing that then disenfranchised groups just remain disenfranchised,” Swaim continued. “Even though you lose a lot of battles, you do win some. If you don't try, you don't win any.”

Swaim also focused her work on voter education and voter registration. Without the ability to host in-person events, she had to get creative.

“The idea came up of a virtual drag show,” Swaim said, which they hoped would appeal to young voters. Swaim recruited five local drag queens to perform virtually, and helped to train the event’s emcee on voter registration talking points to include throughout the show. “We got a lot of people pledged to vote, and some people registered out of that event, so it was really successful, and it was also just a lot of fun.”

For Swaim, the summer internship helped her expand on her career goals of working in public affairs or voter advocacy, and showed her that changes can happen at the grassroots level.

“People get discouraged with government a lot, because they don't see any of their work paying off or getting results, but with Democracy NC you really see at the local level how you can actually get things done,” Swaim said.

Claire Edens: Bounty and Soul

Claire Edens, a senior Spanish major and K-6 teaching licensure student, was led by her Spanish-speaking abilities and her desire to work in the community to an internship with Bounty and Soul, a community-based nonprofit that focuses on providing access to fresh produce and wellness education.

“They do a lot for the community, especially the Spanish-speaking community,” Edens said. “And their motto is ‘produce to the people,’ which I was immediately drawn to.”

Edens spent her internship on a variety of projects, including translating educational materials and recipes into Spanish, preparing “benevolent boxes” to be delivered to Latinx families who are not able or are not comfortable attending the markets, and even creating a cooking class YouTube video in Spanish.

Voter Registration Drag Shows, Flowers in the Rain, and More

Working at the weekly produce markets was also a regular task for Edens. Due to COVID-19 the markets, which provide free produce and were usually a time to gather and connect with members of the community, shifted to drive-thru markets. Edens and the Bounty and Soul staff and volunteers wanted to ensure that they could still create that sense of connection.

“You have to break out of your shell a little bit, because especially the way it is now, they're really trying to keep that sweet and compassionate feel,” Edens said. “So, you're not just like ‘here's some lettuce, here's a carrot.’ It’s like, ‘hey would you like some locally grown lettuce? It's really good!’ You have to engage with people, and that's a big part of who they are.”

Edens said she found great satisfaction in being able to provide something useful to the community.

“It’s little moments,” Edens said. “At one of the most recent markets it rained almost the whole time, and typically I focus on produce and I talk to people about a recipe, but that day we didn't set up my tent just because the weather was supposed to be ominous, so instead they asked me to pass out flowers.

“I had huge buckets of flowers and it was pouring rain and I didn't want to hold an umbrella and the bucket of flowers, so I was just soaking wet and walking through the cars saying, ‘would you like some flowers?’” Edens continued. “Then and then I got into it and started saying things like, ‘has anyone giving you a bouquet recently? Here you go!’ I had given a man in a car some flowers and I was walking past his car again to go give more and he took one of the flowers out of the bouquet that I gave him and he handed it to me. That was one of the highlight moments. He just smiled he didn't say anything.”

Edens has a few more weeks with Bounty and Soul before her internship ends, and she looks forward to carrying the lessons she’s learned and the experiences she gained as she moves forward into her own future. Edens hopes to be able to put her Spanish skills, love for travel, and passion for community engagement to work in her future career.

“One aspect of my education or developing myself as a person ready to go out into the world, is that I hadn’t had a lot of volunteer service hours. So just seeing Bounty and Soul as an organization and how much they serve the community, I really wanted the opportunity to be a part of something like that,” Edens said. “My dream is to work in elementary education, and I would love to be an asset to the Spanish-speaking community in the public school system, and for them to be able to use me to increase equity and access that those families have to services at the school.”

Alex Pritchard: North Carolina Business Council

Alex Pritchard, a sophomore mass communication major and Spanish minor, had a couple internship and job opportunities lined up for the summer. But when they fell through due to the pandemic, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to find a remote internship that appealed to her. That changed when she found a position with the North Carolina Business Council, a network of businesses and business associations that have committed themselves to building resilient, sustainable businesses.

“The description included that working on social media and marketing and administrative work…things like that seemed up my alley,” Pritchard said. “After having my interview with the executive director, she seemed like somebody I would work well with.”

Pritchard’s internship was part of the NC COVID-19 Student Response Corps, a collaborative effort to match students without summer internships or jobs due to COVID-19 with local government and nonprofit organizations in need of additional capacity.

“I didn't expect there to be so many remote opportunities going around, if I'm being honest,” Pritchard said. “But also, that was kind of a surprise to be able to find a remote opportunity and one that I thought I would enjoy and do well with.”

Pritchard, along with additional remote-working interns from UNC-Charlotte, spent the summer working on creating email marketing, social media campaigns, and other materials reaching out to North Carolina businesses about how they could get involved in issues like voting and the Census.

“I am working like on emailing businesses and two counties right now, Halifax and Northampton, where the business council is trying to encourage more people to fill out the Census,” Pritchard said. “One of the things I got to do was sit in on a webinar with the North Carolina Business Council's national partner, which is the American Sustainable Business Council, and they were talking about safe voting in terms of voting during the pandemic in November. It’s going to look very different, and they’re trying to plan for that and get funding for that and making sure everybody has access to the polls.”

Voter Registration Drag Shows, Flowers in the Rain, and More

An added treat—Ben of Ben & Jerry’s was on the call.

Pritchard said she was grateful to have the remote working opportunity over the summer, partly because it gave her a safe way to stay engaged, especially when facing a long summer staying home during the pandemic.

“I will definitely go on doing work that's having an impact, and interacting with people,” Pritchard said. “And also having the executive director of a statewide organization trusting me and saying to me, if you ever need a reference or whatever let me know, that’s great.”

Jesse Reeve: FIRST at Blue Ridge

by D.A. Marcyes

Jesse Reeve, now a senior at UNC Asheville, was finishing up his junior year as a computer science major when he seized a rare opportunity and created his own summer internship.

Photo courtesy of InternView℠ (ampcllc.com/internview)

Reeve had been writing software for FIRST at Blue Ridge, a local, nonprofit, twelve-step residential rehabilitation facility, as part of a special topics course. As the semester drew to a close, he realized the business might still want some help implementing the software into their practices. He jumped at the chance and turned a semester-long course into a summer-long internship.

His greatest takeaway while creating everything from database installation guides to more optimized code with his team of classmates, he said, was “the power of collaboration, and especially interdisciplinary collaboration. The fact that people of many different specializations and backgrounds could have things to offer to a collaborative project that no one person can provide.”

Choosing to intern for a nonprofit was very rewarding for Reeve. He was able to see firsthand the impact his work had not just for the business, but the patients of FIRST at Blue Ridge.

“We're talking about between 150 and 200 people who are trying to turn their lives around from a very dark place,” Reeve said. “If I can make even a slight improvement in the lives of all those people, that accumulates to a really significant contribution to my community.”

That contribution also came in the midst of a pandemic. This made things for him and his classmates much more difficult, but Reeve maintained a positive attitude, joking, “I'm lucky because I'm a computer science guy so I'm sitting in front of a screen anyway.”

While problem solving for FIRST at Blue Ridge, Reeve used many of the skills he learned at UNC Asheville.

“Not only figuring out what [the client] needed but figuring out what would benefit them most and how to make that work for them--that requires a level of communication that I think a liberal arts degree or liberal arts school provides,” Reeve said.

Leaving a glowing review about just how important and helpful internships are during college, Reeve has this to say to any future interns:

A Microsoft Power Automate flow Reeve created for FIRST at Blue Ridge (click to enlarge)

“This is not even mentioning the benefits to your resume--you will learn more in a few months of internship that you will in years of school. You will be challenged in a realistic, real-life scenario. You'll get both the experience that comes from creating a product for an actual customer and the confidence that comes from knowing what the work environment is like, and what requirements will be imposed upon you in the real world.

If you really want to get the full experience… the full benefit of your University education, classes are only the tip of the iceberg. These opportunities are all over the place and, if you know what's good for you, you'll find one and you'll grab it when you see it."

Carlee Benfield: Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

by D.A. Marcyes

Carlee Benfield, UNC Asheville senior, found her true calling while interning at Appalachian Wildlife Refuge during the 2020 summer break. After many previous internships, it was beginning to feel like Benfield would never find the right career path for her biology degree.

“I started loving science when I was a kid. It was something that I was really interested in, but I never could really peg down what part of science I liked,” Benfield explained.

When an email landed in her inbox from the UNC Asheville Career Center, “And it was like hey, Appalachian Wild has internships, look at them,” she recounted, Benfield was immediately drawn to the wildlife rehabilitation they perform in Western North Carolina. So, she applied and joined the team.

Voter Registration Drag Shows, Flowers in the Rain, and More

Benfield’s favorite moment came when she got the chance to cuddle a baby beaver guilt-free due to a special set of circumstances.

“[Beavers] can die of a broken heart,” she said, “They're the one kind of wildlife that has to have love and affection.”

This particular baby beaver tried to enter another beaver’s den, and was wounded in the process, before a local found it and called Appalachian Wild to the rescue. Much to her excitement, Benfield was allowed to wrap the beaver in a little blanket and feed it in her arms.

“I was holding this baby beaver and syringe feeding it...that was my happiest moment and it was just so surreal. I never thought when I applied for this internship I would be sitting here, feeding a baby beaver.”

Many impactful experiences arose while she helped rehabilitate everything from turtles to skunks to baby birds.

“Oh my Lord, baby birds. It was baby bird season when I joined, so I would start at one end and I would go down to the other, and I would feed all the baby birds,” recalled Benfield, “and by the time I got to the end I’d have to start all over again, because they have to be fed every fifteen to thirty minutes and I would have like twenty birds.”

A typical day involved much more than that, though. Benfield would begin each day cleaning the animals and their cages, then she would feed them youngest to oldest, make the next day’s meals, feed the babies three to five times a day, and check in new patients as they came in. While working with animals, she was instructed to interact with them as little as possible.

“You have to put your own selfish desires and wants aside for a minute and realize, hey, I'm actually supposed to be taking care of this animal, and taking care of this animal means keeping it wild. I want it to be mean. I want it to not like me.”

Benfield feeding baby sparrows

Benfield has Savannah Trantham, executive director and co-founder of Appalachian Wildlife Refuge, to thank for many magical moments on the job.

“Savannah let me release [my first possum] and seeing that entire process was so moving,” Benfield said. “We raised this baby possum from being tube fed all the way up until it was a juvenile. Watching it go off into the wild, it's so incredible. It’s an amazing process...it's really unforgettable, honestly.”

Trantham also showed Benfield just how important college classes can be in the real world.

“She takes everything that she’s learned from school when talking about an animal,” Benfield reflected. “When she's describing what's wrong with it, what's broken, she's not saying, ‘oh that little bone over there in the arm’s broken.’ She’s actually using specific terms and she's talking about them the way I feel a scientist, a biologist, would talk about them.”

Seeing these real-world applications made even classes like botany, not one of Benfield’s most lovable classes, feel more meaningful.

“It got me more inspired about school a little bit, because [Tranthem] uses this in everyday life and it's something that's super applicable when I go to these internships.”

Concerning higher education and internships, Benfield believes that, “One without the other isn’t completely full,” and she knows firsthand the crucial role internships play when choosing a career. Through many internships , Benfield went from pursuing nursing, to paramedicine, to aquarium work (where she found out, “salt water really takes a toll on your skin [and] you constantly smell like shrimp,”) then on to domestic animal medicine, before finally discovering a passion for education via Appalachian Wild.

While on her internship journey, Benfield received much-appreciated help from a particular professor at UNC Asheville.

“I took zoology with Dr. [Graham] Reynolds, who I just love. He’s amazing,” remarked Benfield, “I was able to go to Dr. Reynolds and say ‘I have no clue what I want to do, and I’m supposed to be a senior next year. I feel like I'm supposed to know what I kind of want to do’... and he was so helpful in helping me find one and just being really supportive.”

Intern Nichola Cormier hard at work

Her greatest takeaway from that pivotal internship with Appalachian Wild, Benfield said, was a respect and understanding for nature, and a drive to share that with others.

“How do I educate and provide a sense of community for people who don’t do the internship,” Benfield said. “I think that was the most important thing that I walked away with. I have this respect and I have this understanding, but how do I continue to make sure that other people can get it without having to commit to something like an internship.”

For the students out there who are struggling with career choice just as she did, Benfield has this advice:

“Pick something that you like, pick something that you think you can see yourself doing, or pick something that you think you’re good at and go find an internship for it and see. And it's okay if you don't like it. I mean, hell, I didn't like a lot of them and that's okay.”

Veronica Judson: Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Internship

During Summer 2020, UNC Asheville student Veronica Judson worked with personal hero and leading gerrymandering expert, Moon Duchin, to redefine unfair voting district boundaries in America.

Judson first reached out to Duchin after seeing her flyer on campus. “I sent her an email and I was like, ‘Whatever you're doing, I want to be a part of it. Please take me under your wing. Teach me. I want to know everything.’ I thought it was amazing. Combining math and science—that's my major and minor—I didn't know you could really do it, I hadn't heard of other people doing it, and then she's doing it. She is taking her math skills and applying it to democracy. She's amazing. I aspire to be her,” Judson excitedly said.

Voter Registration Drag Shows, Flowers in the Rain, and More

The two communicated back and forth, and eventually Judson was accepted to a two-week summer internship where she directly helped Duchin’s redistricting efforts. There, she made rough, sharpied precinct maps into data-filled masterpieces. Then, Judson explains, “Other people who were hired to work afterwards would take my demographic data and voter data, and they would put it on top of that precinct data so we could say, ‘Precinct A, Buncombe County voted like this.’”

This information would then be used to draw district lines which accurately represent the population. Judson illustrates how previously gerrymandered districts could be harmful with this scenario: “Let’s say there are twelve blocks. How you break up those blocks determines who wins and who loses. In North Carolina, if you pack all the Democrats into one itty bitty little spot, then of course Democrats will win that one spot. But, if you made all the districts Republican except for that one, of course the Republicans are going to win overall.”

Gerrymandering is an issue which hits close to home for UNCA students, Judson points out. “North Carolina was redrawn because of gerrymandering. We had a racial gerrymander we were caught in last year. It actually went to the courts and they said, ‘Yeah, this is gerrymandering. You have to redraw your line.’ In Buncombe County, UNCA was cut directly in half and so we were in between two districts.”

Judson’s internship experience was delightful, and intense. “We met from 10 in the morning till 6 at night for two weeks straight. It was a lot. We got a little bit of a lunch break... but it was amazing. The entire thing was,” Judson describes, “It brings great joy when you finally figure out, wait, everything I said I wanted to do, somebody does it, and they're teaching me how to do it.”

After Judson graduates from UNC Asheville, she will pursue a PhD in Political Science and has already been accepted into two very prestigious programs.

For more information about internships available to UNC Asheville students, visit the Career Center website.

© 2026 UNC Asheville

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