My Internship at Oxen Hill Farm

My name is Casey Kaplan and I am a senior business and management major at Wheaton College (MA). This past summer I got the opportunity to have an internship at Oxen Hill Farm in Suffield, CT. I worked on their social media and digital marketing which was funded by the Wheaton Edge. In reminiscing on my time, I am reminded of how grateful I am that I got the chance to have an internship during a worldwide pandemic.

As a rising senior, something I had never experienced in my life was the “WFH” lifestyle. I was always very used to being on my feet for my past jobs so sitting at my desk three out of five days of the week was definitely an adjustment. Something special about my time at Oxen Hill Farm was that I had worked here previously so I knew the place and what it stood for very well. On top of my remote internship during the week I also got to work on the farm two days a week which gave me the chance to take photos (swiss chard (pictured above on the left), and cherry tomatoes (last picture) as well as get additional content for the social media pages. Although my hybrid opportunity was two separate entities, I lived close enough and had the prior relationship with my boss so I could see customers and have some sort of interaction with people on the days I wasn’t sitting behind a computer screen. The day to day was consistent within the week but changed during each month of the internship. In the beginning, a lot of my duties had to do with organizing and helping the CSA Farm Share members pick a time slot for pick up to reduce the number of people and comply with social distancing rules and regulations. After the planning and coordinating through emails in the first month, my job consisted of updating the social media pages and providing content, like pictures of produce for Instagram as well as rebuilding the website for the farm.

Creating a website was not one of the easier tasks I took on and was something I was definitely surprised by. It was very misleading seeing all of the free site building companies saying, “It’s free and easy!” I give a lot of credit to website creators and all of the work that goes into formatting and designing what their customer tells them they want their website to look like. As someone with almost no experience in this realm. I struggled a lot during the process of designing the website even with all of the resources like podcasts, and video tutorials that the internet has to offer. Although it took a while, something finally clicked, and I figured out how to make the content stay in the places I wanted it to. (Sounds simple but was pretty hard for me as I had never done something like that before)! I definitely appreciate the challenge of this and all of the time I had to spend working through it on my own.

 

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