Student Profile

Shannon Hazlitt

I officially started working with Syracuse Community Geography in Fall of 2014 and although I am only minoring in geography as an aspiring environmental journalist, I’m from an Upstate New York farm family so I’ve always appreciated people’s connection to the land.

Through this internship I also hope to learn more about community and environment connections that are often an important piece of environmental journalism stories. This internship also offered the opportunity to use my multimedia storytelling skills to document the experiences and histories of refugees working in Syracuse’s northern community gardens.

Amplifying and expanding the social media presence of Syracuse Community Geography and Syracuse Grows, the non-profit organization that connects community gardens throughout the Syracuse area (including those where refugees work) are other projects I am pursuing.
I’ve taken previous geography classes at S.U. and while studying abroad for a semester in Santiago, Chile that have given me a base knowledge about how to understand and gather information about communities’ unique connections with their environments.

However, I have more experience in the journalism realm as a writer for the student-run publications The Daily Orange and TheNewsHouse.com as well as for the professional publications The Ithaca Journal, The Elmira-Star Gazette, and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) Communications Department. My free time is often filled with writing and planning stories, however when I can find time I enjoy learning guitar and running outside.

Through my experiences at SGC I hope I can become a more informed environmental writer and I look forward to seeing how SCG continues to support the Syracuse community, with its talented and devoted students and faculty, in the future.