Environment, art shaped senior’s education
Environmental studies major Sarah Ellen Dean took classes in art and a dozen other subjects, volunteered and traveled.
Deliberate planning helps things succeed, like drawing a floor plan before building a house or gathering ingredients before cooking.
Similarly, May graduate Sarah Ellen Dean sought specific classes, volunteer work and other experiences to build a well-rounded liberal arts education. For starters, she’s mixed an environmental studies major with a minor in studio art.
After a childhood in which her parents nurtured her love of nature and art, she entered Carolina planning to major in chemistry. But in spring 2022 she purposefully took an introductory class on environment and society. “That course made it easy to change my major,” she said.
Since then, she’s studied in classes from 14 different academic departments. “I’ve taken the idea of a liberal arts degree to the nth degree. I’ve studied across a breadth of subjects, and that feels true to me.”
A wood sculpture class introduced her to the Carolina Tree Heritage Program, which transforms wood from downed trees on campus into furniture.
“The class was instrumental in my success. It was the first class where I was given tools, materials and time to create my vision,” she said. “Wood sculpture and the studio arts are so intimate because your hands truly craft everything. Not only is it great to hold something and say, ‘I made this,’ but there’s an additional meaningfulness to the artist because you’ve been with that piece every step of the way.”
Dean, seen here as a first-year student in 2022, used fallen trees in art and shared that work with campus. Learn more about that work in this Artistic Minds story. (Photo Illustration by Johnny Andrews/UNC-Chapel Hill)
In spring 2023, Dean enrolled in Carolina’s Sustainable Triangle Field Site, which allows students to follow their research interests to solve real-world sustainability questions facing the University and town of Chapel Hill. “That experience connected me to the web of environmental science programs and people here,” she said. Through the site, she met staff members at Carolina’s Institute for the Environment. She became an intern for the institute, writing feature stories on the institute’s scientists, projects and events.
In fall 2024, she studied in Florence, Italy. She took an environmental philosophy class and a class to learn about the histories, cultures and dishes from 14 Italian regions.
Her volunteer experiences have been as varied as her academic experiences. Through the service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega, she’s been active in organizing service activities and community partnerships.
Sarah Dean has studied in classes from 14 different academic departments during her time at Carolina. (Submitted, graphic by Gillie Sibrian/UNC-Chapel Hill)
Many of her service activities were related to the environment. Her favorite service was removing invasive plant species from local forests and parks with Rewild Earth. Since her first year at Carolina, she’s been involved in a campus organization that promotes composting. “CompostMates connected me with the idea of starting locally and growing in influence. Composting with a network of 50 different composters and taking their compost to UNC’s community gardens makes me want to scale up in a way.”
Dean feels another volunteer experience encompassed her experience and summed up who she was as a person. A classmate, who was interning with a local program called EcoHeal through UNC’s EcoStudio, was building a house made of cob — a natural building material made of sand, straw, clay and water. Dean volunteered to help.
She found it deeply gratifying to build an environmentally sustainable home that would help inhabitants align with the ecosystem’s natural rhythms. “It was a beautiful experience that came from a connection at UNC, but my motivation was highly intrinsic. That’s the story of who I am. I get connected, and I go for it,” she said.
After graduating, Dean will enter Northwestern University’s Master of Science and Law program. “Ultimately, I want to reach more people and make more positive change,” she said. “It’s important that we take environmental science seriously, not as an afterthought. I want to be a part of that conversation and use my experiences to lift that movement.”
