Elle Hall-Holt, NUR ’26, Northfield, MN
When I arrived at Holden Village in Eastern Washington, I was not prepared for how much I would learn. My official job in the village taught me to rediscover my passion for the arts, my new friends taught me to truly live my life to the fullest, the wilderness taught me that I belong, and my medical mentors taught me both practical first aid skills and how to stay calm in any emergency—even when I’m alone in the middle of nowhere. Holden Village is a remote mountain community that provides access to hiking, backpacking, fiber arts, dance, educational sessions, spiritual and religious experiences, yoga, pottery, and many other recreational activities. I was hired as the Arts Associate for the summer of 2024, which meant that I spent the summer developing arts curriculum, teaching art classes, maintaining and resetting more than 10 looms, and maintaining the art studio workspace.
In addition to my arts associate job, I made it my mission to learn wilderness first aid from the medical professionals in the village. In the first two weeks of summer, I took the official Wilderness First Aid class, which includes sixteen hours of in-person instruction and hands-on practice. Many of the skills I learned were review from my first two years in nursing at Penn, except slightly tweaked to be more appropriate for a remote setting with limited resources. After taking the class and developing my skills further with the village medics, I feel prepared to address the most common injuries and illnesses in the wilderness. One of the most important skills I learned was exactly when to defer care to a professional with more experience or resources. In a hospital setting, deferral of care is clearer cut and defined by unit protocol. However, there are always medical situations where it is essential to know exactly when a patient needs a higher level of care, even within a hospital setting. I was able to learn this skill quickly due to Holden’s remote location.
The summer of 2024 was the best summer of my life because of the friends I made, skills I learned, and beautiful outdoor experiences I had. In these final two weeks, I have struggled with the reality that I will have to leave this place that feels more like home than my hometown. Before coming to Holden, I had never experienced community care in the ways I have experienced it here. The villagers at Holden share their kindness, expertise, and life experiences freely with the community. Every person has an essential role in keeping the village running, and each person is valued as an individual. Respect was shown to me in many ways, but I deeply appreciated the village-wide recognition of pronouns and queer identities. The community at Holden has shown me that interdependence, rest, and mutual aid are not far off goals. I hope to bring this new wisdom and joy back to Penn to share it with my friends, classmates, patients, and the larger West Philadelphia community.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2024 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
