When Brittany Wescott traded her orientation packet for a bucket and gardening shears at the Dartmouth YMCA’s farm, she felt right at home.

The incoming freshman at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School of Law knows her way around plants, having grown up in Burlington, Vermont working on a dairy farm and on her mother’s garden.

She was one of about 40 incoming students to end a week-long law school orientation program with a volunteering day at the Dartmouth YMCA’s Sharing the Harvest Community Farm on August 18.

For Wescott, it seemed like a perfect placement for her desired area of law – corporate and family law. She settled on the corporate area because she already has a business background, but wants to pursue family law to help children and families.

Organized by the Julie Cahill, the law school’s Director of Student Engagement and Professional Development, the event concluded orientation with a community service project that impacts the local community, and provides students with a chance to get to know each other and where they will call home for the next few years of their studies.

“We have people who have never been to a farm before and didn’t know what to expect,” Cahill said. “It’s a real eye-opening experience that is broadening people’s horizons in a good way.”

Cahill noted community service is a part of the law school’s mission, which just celebrated exceeding 100,000 community service hours in July. It operates the Justice Bridge program for people in need of legal services who could not otherwise afford to hire an attorney, and a Public Interest Law Fellowship intended for students planning for careers in public service.

“I was looking for a real community service project, and it didn’t have to be legal in nature,” Cahill said of choosing the farm visit, which began last year.