Students gather at Green Careers coffee social

More than two-dozen students passed through the Class of 1947 Room in the Homer Babbage Library as Rising Green hosted a coffee social to facilitate internship and job opportunities for students on Tuesday.

“Our goal was to get at least 20 students in the room, and we definitely had more than that,” Rising Green’s founder and CEO Adrian Dahlin said. “We had one much smaller event, but this is the first one of this size.”

Green organizations from across Connecticut and the region were present for the event, including The Farmer’s Cow, Next Step Living, Blue Lion Training, Clean Water Action, Neighbor-to-Neighbor Energy Challenge, U.S. PIRG, SavATree and SavALawn. 

Representatives of the organizations talked with students in attendance about internship and job opportunities in green career fields.

UConn Rising Green campus liaisons Kerrin Kinnear and Morgan McCabe also talked with students, answering any questions and informing them about future Rising Green events on campus.

Students in attendance were offered free cookies, brownies and coffee – furnished by The Farmer’s Cow in Mansfield – in addition to handouts from the organizations while they went from table-to-table and talked with one another.

Dahlin, a 2010 graduate of Tufts University in political science and environmental studies, founded Rising Green in September 2011. He made a presentation to the group about his background and how Rising Green came into existence, sharing his hope of the organization eventually becoming “a ‘green LinkedIn’ plus the real world.”

“The inspiration was seeing a need for facilitation of connections between job seekers and employers in, specifically, the green job and sustainability space,” Dahlin said of the driving force that led him to found the organization. “That was the need that was identified, and I won a grant on the very broad idea of building a website that would be resource for students finding career opportunities.”

Since being founded in 2011, Rising Green has expanded its presence to four campuses in New England, including Tufts, UConn, UMass and Boston University. Dahlin expressed a desire to expand their presence onto more campuses in the near future while continuing to develop the website.

Rising Green plans to host another event on the UConn campus following spring break, though a specific date has not yet been set. The event, a networking luncheon, will be more targeted than the coffee social, specifically focusing on solar energy opportunities for students seeking employment in that field.