Amy’s Journal

Even though I always have a job open to me at Amy’s, my parents and I both thought that getting a little experience working at another company would be interesting for me. So I am interning for the summer at Traditional Medicinals, an awesome organic medicinal herbal tea company out in the country in Sebastopol…about 40 minutes from my house. I am interning in both the QC (quality control) and R&D (research and development) departments, doing a project looking at the supply chain and sources of all their herbs, which come from little communities all over the world! TM is really committed to helping alleviate poverty and suffering by supporting these communities, and it feels great to be doing my small part to help them do that.

The working environment at TM is really cool too, since their offices and factory are way out in the country down a one lane road with horses and pigs bordering them. Here are some pictures of the building and the grounds.

This is the office building. I work on the second floor.

This is my cute little cubicle (sigh, someday I will be important and have an office with a window )

My absolute favorite thing to do during break and lunch is go sit in the herb garden. TM has a huge herb garden with examples of a lot of the herbs that they use, and its fun to go meander around looking and smelling the different flowers and plants, or just sit by the lavender and watch the thousands of bumblebees in bliss.

But by far, my favorite part of working at Traditional Medicinals is the people. They are all unique and totally quirky, are soo interesting and inspiring, and are really passionate about what they do. I have two bosses, Katie and Joseph (there is no picture of Joseph because he was in Germany and India doing very important things when I was photographing). Katie is VP of QC, and Joseph is VP of R&D. They both care so much, and I love working with them. I am learning a ton every day.

This is a picture of me with my boss Katie down in the cage where I sample herbs. My my aren’t hair-nets flattering.

Ok, so, this is David. David is not my boss, but he sits next to me and was sort of my boss while Joseph was gone. He is the resident herbalist, and he knows more about herbs than anyone you will probably ever meet in your life. He is also the resident British conspiracy theorist hippie whose father was the photographer for the Beatles (how cool is that? he saw them all the time growing up). One afternoon he told me that my job was to contemplate the veins on my orchid petals for the next few hours (he was kidding, sort of). This is the sign on his door:

In fact, this pretty much sums up the entire company.”Herbalists for Peace”–could i have possibly found a cooler place to intern? (except Amy’s, of course) Most definitely not.