College students beautify local park

Wading around in a swampy pond overgrown with debris and trash on a Sunday morning is not many people's idea of a good time, but for a few Philadelphia college students, it was a rewarding morning to remember.

"It's a good way to spend my Sunday," said Claudia Mesquita, a freshman at the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College. "You get a good feeling after the fact."

Mesquita was one of a group of local college students participating in Park Beautification Day at Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park, the culminating activity of the Philadelphia College Festival's weeklong series of events -- which have included an internship fair and a Busta Rhymes concert.

As Bonnie Grant, the deputy city representative who began the festival back in 1999, said, "We were looking for a community service aspect -- where better than Fairmount Park, which is such an underused venue?"

The city decided to contact the National Lands Restoration and Environmental Education Program, whose mission, said Jason Mifflin, one of its volunteer coordinators, is "to restore the natural areas of Fairmount Park."

"It was only a natural partnership to work with the Philadelphia college life," he added.

Mifflin explained what the organization was trying to do on Lemon Hill. The area includes what used to be a beautiful pond, with amazing wildlife and native vegetation, as well as walking paths.

As it became overgrown with feral vegetation and people began to throw their trash around, the area became rather unfortunate looking. The group has decided to provide regular maintenance to the area in order to promote its use. This includes a great deal of removal of harmful non-native plants, a huge clean-up initiative and then adding more native species back into the area.

"The more you beautify and take care of an area, the more people respect it" and want to spend time there, Mifflin said.

Randy Giancaterino, the public relations consultant at the Office of the City Representative in the Department of Commerce said that the point of the College Festival is to "bond college students to the community."

"We want them out and about [in Philadelphia] and out of their university micro-cities," he added, noting that there were tons of things to do in Philadelphia, this being just one example of reasons to stay in the city after graduation and get linked to the community at large.

"Penn has been a very big supporter of the festival," said Nan Latona, the director of the Philadelphia College Festival, adding that some Penn students had signed up to participate in the event.

Giancaterino said that much of the initiative for the festival is to remind students that "there's more to Philly than South Street and your campus."

As Lesley Young, a freshman at the University of the Sciences said, "It's been a great experience -- my major is environmental science and this is something that I love to get involved in."

The project on Lemon Hill is something that will continue regularly in order to further beautify the park and make it a more enjoyable place for everyone to go.

While some students used College Fest as a way to get involved through hands-on work in the community, others took a more career-oriented path, attending the festival's first annual internship fair.

The event, held at the Kimmel Center last Wednesday, was attended by 150 company representatives and students from a wide variety of Philadelphia-area colleges and universities. Among other things, it featured three one-hour workshops ranging in subject from "How to Dress for Success" to "Networking 101."

Undergraduates, graduate students and Philadelphia residents simply looking for jobs browsed the many information tables, heard Mayor John Street speak and attended workshops held throughout the day.

In his welcome speech, Street announced the launch of a new Web site, www.careerphilly.com, a regional search engine for jobs and internships. Career Philly, created by festival sponsor Innovation Philadelphia, is part of the city's effort to retain students after graduation, encouraging them to live and work in Philadelphia rather than relocate to other cities.

As the fair began to wind down around 5 p.m., sponsors of the event said they were pleased with the turnout and hope to make it an annual part of the College Festival.

"It's hard to tell how many people came, because of the layout," said Emily Ford, a project coordinator for communication and economic development at Innovation Philadelphia. "But I think the employers were definitely pleased with the turnout."

Engineering sophomore Kusha Tavakoli thought the internship fair was "definitely a good idea," but was disappointed in the lack of engineering companies present.

"I kept getting e-mails about the fair, and I thought I should check it out, since I do want to get a job eventually," Tavakoli said, adding that he wished he had come earlier for the workshop seminars.

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