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This paper aims to explore the outputs of an internship programme, one of a number of campus-based sustainability activities that have been introduced at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, to encourage student-led campus-based greening initiatives.

A case study approach was undertaken, allowing the researcher to investigate the programme in its real-life context. The researcher used multiple sources of evidence to gain as holistic a picture as possible.

Interns report positive changes in their behaviours towards sustainability, s well as encouraging feedback on their experiential learning, the development of their soft skills and the creation of new knowledge. Moreover, students communicated perceived benefits for their future careers. The reported outcomes reflect mutually beneficial relationships for student and institution, for example, raising the profile of campus greening activities and supporting the University’s aim to embed sustainability throughout its campus, community and culture.

The researcher recognises the limitations of the research, in particular, the small sample size, which has resulted primarily in qualitative results being presented.

Feedback from previous interns will be used to shape future internships. In particular, Institute of Sustainable Practice, Innovation and Resource Effectiveness (INSPIRE) will look for opportunities to work more closely with University operations, departments, faculties and alongside University staff, both academic and support staff.

Following student feedback, INSPIRE will give students opportunities for wider involvement, including an opportunity to propose their own projects to shape future internships that meet the needs of student body on campus.

Despite being one case study from one institution, the research highlights the value of such programmes for other institutions.

In 1985, I was moving along a more or less definable disciplinary path, writing qualitative sociology guided by my understanding of leading symbolic interactionist texts, productively disturbed by affection for Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. Although there were prior lines of influence, my writing then was focused especially on various “social constructionist” projects, first with Peter Conrad (Conrad & Schneider, 1992 [1980]; Schneider & Conrad, 1983) and then with Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse (Kitsuse & Schneider, 1984, 1989). I also read closely and had many conversations with Anselm Strauss about how to do what he and Barney Glaser called “grounded theory” and with Howard Becker about “doing sociology.” Not only did I feel that I was getting better at doing ethnography or field work and “writing it up,” as we put it in Sociology, I felt I was engaged in an epistemologically superior practice relative to the more quantitative and structurally oriented work that was then and still is defined as “mainstream” (a land from which I had emigrated, gradually, after the Ph.D.).