Officially an Intern

I officially have an internship. I no longer feel like a lost puppy in a scary world of big dogs, now I have to help my classmates find some. We're kind of on our own out of the WWU Huxley Everett campus, since our program director, and most of the faculty is located out of Port Angeles. There were plenty of internships posted for the Olympic Peninsula, but those of us in Everett, were forced to look on the Bellingham campus postings.

This not only means that we have to compete with students out of the large main campus Huxley College, but we also have to compete against students from UW, Central, Evergreen and other large universities here on the west side. Needless to say, the paid internships have pretty fierce competition, and I wasn't willing to wait around another 3 weeks to see if I got any of those positions. I figured I might as well get a head start on everyone else for unpaid positions, and cold called 8 agencies last Wednesday.

Snohomish County Parks Planning Department was the first to get back to me, with an internship plan included. A day later, the City of Arlington called me back, and wanted to make an internship plan with the Natural Resource department. I took the SnoCo position, because parks are kind of my passion, and they were always so good to me, even as a student volunteer in high school. A lot of projects we started in the mid 90's are full-blown parks, trails and campgrounds now, and it's fascinating to me seeing what they've become after only being involved in the early grunt-work. I still want to talk with the City of Arlington to see if there's an opportunity to work for them one day a week during the next school year so I don't have to wait for internship hours next summer to graduate - we need a minimum of 300 hours.

I'm really excited for the SnoCo position, though. I went into the interview room, expecting a one-on-one with the Planning director, but ended up in an actual meeting with other planners. He brought in Chris, who was the planner I interviewed for a class project last quarter, and two other planners. I was expecting the regular questions, you know, "why do you want to work here, what are your strengths/weaknesses?" etc, but it was actually a brainstorming session to throw projects at me. Towards the end of the meeting, the Parks director walked in, and I got to meet him, too. Then last night, the hubby turned on "Parks and Rec" and I felt like a dork. Whatever, I like my future projects.

Some of my work may end up on the SnoCo website, or at public meetings. I'll get to use ArcGIS, GPS, and AutoCAD, and of course Power Point for presentations. I don't care how dumb Amy Poehler makes Parks staff look, I'm excited. And speaking of excitement, I've got to jet for a day of preparations for Tay's 13 th birthday party tonight. Minute-to-win-it games, possibly the box-in-a-box game, and tons of 12 and 13 year olds at the Darrington Community Center. Jealous much?