Cake on a Lake – The Everyday Surprises of Working at the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute

By Maureen Cunningham, Executive Director of the Adirondack Watershed Institute

Fall hiking with AWI colleagues at the VIC

Just over six months into my role as Executive Director of the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute (AWI), and this place still manages to amaze me every day. My first day of work in late summer 2025 started with a day of weeding to get the campus gardens ready for the start of the school year and ended with an ice-cold Smitty-brand beer at the on-campus bar overlooking Lower St. Regis Lake, compliments of College President Dan Kelting. And that was just day one. 

My colleague Annie Arnold at the student-run bakery on campus

Paul Smith’s College has majors in everything from culinary arts and hospitality to fisheries, forestry, and natural resource management. Having that unique mix means every day brings something new. On the day I tried campus yoga for the first time, I followed the crowd rushing over to the student bakery for what turned out to be an opening day I didn’t know to look forward to. Now I do - and to this day, bakery days are my favorites. The student-led restaurant, with its four-course tasting menu and craft mocktails, has only increased my appreciation for the culinary work happening on campus, which must also be one of the Adirondacks’ best-kept fine dining secrets.

One Saturday last fall, I tagged along with a group of students and faculty for a hike to the “elder grove” located on part of the College’s 14,000-acre property, for several hours helping to inventory 400+ year-old white pines that stand there - and have probably stood there since before Europeans first came to this place.

A new student treehouse being announced

On any given day on the campus lawn, you might see a faculty chef cooking on an open fire at the furnished lean-to by the lake, a pair of students learning to steer Paul Smith’s stock horses, or the marathon canoe team running in and out of the water in record time with a boat in the air. Last fall, students constructed a new treehouse in a matter of weeks in a wooded stand near my office. 

AWI’s field monitoring team in action on Lower St. Regis Lake

Working at AWI brings its own surprises and perks, including training for winter water quality monitoring on a frozen and wind-swept lake; attending a class that connects watershed science to the arts taught by our own AWI fiber artist and research director Michale Glennon, and a team-building hike at Paul Smith’s Visitor Interpretive Center (the VIC) and its many trails that are accessible from the main campus throughout all seasons.

Our work at AWI, too, is broad and varied: we have the only state-certified water quality laboratory in the Adirondack Park and we manage a state contract to run dozens of boat washing stations throughout the park to ward off aquatic invasive species. I like to tell people that one of our directors Brett Wimsatt also happens to be the College’s bass fishing coach in his spare time… because of course, Paul Smith’s College has a bass fishing team! 

The cake on a lake, with one of the fish we caught during our ice fishing outing

Maybe the most iconic Paul Smith’s day of my first six months, though, happened earlier this month. After winning a “fancy cake” through a raffle at the student bakery (which may or may not have closely resembled my wedding cake from twenty years ago), I enjoyed an afternoon with my AWI colleagues ice fishing on the lake on a bluebird March day. The cake - after being procured through the raffle - was transported onto the lake via snowmobile and became the centerpiece of our afternoon festivities... until it became dessert. There is perhaps no better visual representation of AWI and Paul Smith’s College than our team posing with the cake on the icy lake, alongside - of course – one of the many fish we caught. 

Coming into this role at AWI felt in many ways like coming home to me, especially because the Adirondacks is where I first learned to love water. What I didn’t fully expect was how deeply that connection would extend through the uniquely Adirondack way that learning, work, and life blend together every day here at AWI and on the campus of Paul Smith’s College.