It's time to wait for the Port of Portland

I have completed my application for the Port of Portland internship and will submit it shortly before the deadline later this afternoon. I am delaying in case the HR rep I spoke to gives me further information on who I should address the cover letter to.

Strangely enough I am not as excited about it as I thought I would have been. This may partly a defense mechanism on my behalf to keep a rejection from stinging like those that I received in June. It may also because I like what I am doing in Bend so much. At one point I had thought that I wouldn't like working at the local level in the city environment, but I am in fact enjoying the variety of things that have to be tackled. The environment is very dynamic and Damian told me he's never been bored there. The Port of Portland would be a bit different likely with less political intrigue and much more stability. My sense of the Port is only from the short time I was there getting a tour from my mentor, so I am aware that there's a good sense that working or interning there might be different than my initial impression.

I think a lot of what I have liked so far with being at the City of Bend is the culture of the office. The Long Range division is small and since everybody there knows what they are doing, the manager is very hands off. In terms of the political spectrum, it also seems like a good fit for me. They all have reasonably progressive values, but are not to the extreme like some in Portland can be. I also mentioned to Damian how I was taken aback at one of my professor's completely dismissive attitude towards any place that wasn't Portland and he actually was able to guess who it was. I am glad that I am not the only person that didn't think he was being a little pompous when making sweeping statements like he has.

I also have a much better sense of how the Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) which is a state agency, interacts with the city. It sounds like the pendulum has swung a little too far in the direction of state rather than local control with some members of DLCD wanting to make all the other cities more like Portland. When I asked the staff in Bend if their frustrations meant that working for DLCD would be a bad gig, they insisted that it actually wouldn't be since a person's professional reputation is separate from the agency they work for. Plus, they believe that DLCD is in a transitional phase and that it will eventually resort back to its intended role of provided guidance rather than dictation to cities.

Diving into literature review

One thing that I would have to say about my Master's program at Portland State; it at the very least has prepared me in several ways for my internship. Right now I am doing a literature review of transit-oriented development, finding out what works and what doesn't so that the City of Bend can show the state how it will reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) with the addition of new land into the urban growth boundary (UGB). I am aware that that is quite technical, but unfortunately that's about as simple as I can make it. Literature review is a task more associated with academic research, but unlike other fields, planning academic research is actually fairly applicable to the real world. Thus I have already reviewed and read a lot of journal articles about the topic and tried to summarize the important parts so that it will eventually inform the City about what to do.

The lit review has been fine as it is within my capabilities and it is a big enough undertaking that I never truly have nothing to do. On the flip side, I would like to be involved with more meetings and tasks that involve other people or collaboration. Sitting in a cubicle for nearly 7 hours straight isn't exciting even if the work is interesting.

I had taken it upon myself to add bicycle route data for Bend into Google Map Maker since there was very little of it before and because it was something I could churn out in a few hours. I was making changes route by route based upon a transportation plan from 2006. I actually was nearly done with it before Brian decided to check with Colleen in the GIS department. She did a little research and found out what Google is looking for so that she could just upload the official data directly to them to ensure accuracy. This of course would have been the way to do it initially, but I could not find where to upload ESRI shapefiles. My pawprints will not be on the final data that Google Maps incorporates into its bicycle route and trails layers but at least I can say that I was a contributing factor in spurring it on. Brian noted that this ball wouldn't be rolling if I hadn't brought it to light and he joked that I delegated this task up to Colleen. I had enjoyed working in Google Map Maker and am just a little disappointed that it's not ultimately me dealing with Google. When it comes time for me to denote my experience on my resume, I think I can fairly say that I assisted or contributed to this effort.

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I know that a significant portion or even an outright majority of what a person learns in an internship is beyond technical skills or makes for good bullets on a resume. I am trying where possible to learn life lessons, career lessons and glean what I can from the knowledge of the people around me. Thanks to all of the layoffs everybody left in Long Range Planning has been in the business for quite some time and has a wealth of wisdom. I got to talking to Damian, who isn't quite as easy to talk to as Brian due to the way he likes to joke around, and he let me know that he's never been bored in his current job or his previous job with Deschutes County. He's been with the City of Bend for 7 years and was with Deschutes County for 10, so that bodes well for me having a career in work that stays interesting. His career also seems to mimic what I have seen from others: his first few years after school he worked in a few different positions and then after that he entered a long period of stability. I hope that my career can resemble something like that.

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The deadline for a Transportation Planner Internship with the Port of Portland is on August 5. They didn't state anywhere that a cover letter or resume was required but I decided to do both of them just in case. This is a paid position, so I assume that the procedure for hiring would be quite similar to hiring a full time employee. Updating my resume to reflect my short time here in Bend was quick; tweaking my cover letter has not been so quick. I don't normally consider myself an overly wordy person so it comes as a bit of a surprise that my cover letter is on the long side and it needs to be pared down. I have an extremely strong genuine interest both in this internship and with getting my foot in the door with the Port of Portland and I hope that that comes through in the cover letter. It's not just that I want an internship badly; I want this internship.

After my stumbles with Washington County and especially with Metro earlier this summer my expectations have been tempered with respect to my viability for positions. Regardless of what happens here, there will still be plenty of reasonable opportunities for me in the next few months that would be a good usage of my remaining time in graduate school.

More on City of Bend internship as well as a new possibility

I have an overall positive feeling about how my internship with the City of Bend will turn out. I find all of the projects that Brian pitched to me genuinely interesting. I am already getting a much better sense of how local level planning intersects with the interests and requirements of the statement. I also was reminded of how important the professional interaction component of this internship is to me. On the second day I was largely left to my own devices in my cubicle and had a hard time not getting discouraged. I want to meet other people, make contacts and get the bits and pieces of wisdom that I can glean from conversations with those that have been in the business for awhile. Above all, I want my experience here to either lead me to a connection that helps me get a job or else gives me something positive to point to on my resume in a future interview.

A few days ago I received a mass email from Ethan Seltzer about a Port of Portland internship. Not only is it with the Port, which would be an awesome place to work, but it was a Transportation Planning Intern. I got pretty excited until I saw the part where they said that they wanted somebody that wasn't graduating in Spring 2012. This didn't make a whole lot of sense to me because the only people that it applied to were incoming MURPs, people that haven't even started a day of classes at Portland State.

I emailed an HR rep and she gave me contradictory information:

Our intern programs are typically run 12 months. In order to be eligible for our internship program, you must be enrolled in school at least part-time for the duration. You cannot graduate before the duration of the internship is over – which would typically be 12 months from your hire date. If you graduate during spring term 2012 you will not be eligible to finish your internship after your graduation date, therefore spring 2012 graduates will not be eligible for this internship unless you have already enrolled in a master’s program.

However, this internship is unlike more of our programs. It is only budgeted for a certain number of hours – most likely lasting 6-8 months. You are eligible to apply.

Please feel free to call me with any further questions. It looks more confusing on paper than it really is.

For starters, it would almost appear that her grasp of the English language is rather tenuous, but more importantly it didn't send me a consistent message as to my eligibility. I am going to go ahead and apply and leave information on the specifics of when I graduate out. I'll note that I am slated to graduate in 2012, but not denote that it's June. Shoot, if it's the difference between me getting this or not I can just push off graduating until the end of the summer.

Of course this gives me not such a kind thought: perhaps some of my competition will not bother to apply because of this confusion. The potential trip up for me is when it is that they would want me to start if I got it. My current gig started so late in the summer that I can't in good conscience leave it prior to the middle of September. The deadline for Port of Portland is August 5. They are a large, most likely bureaucratic organization, so there is a chance that by the time I they reviewed the applications, interviewed applicants and made a decision that it might be well into September.

If this didn't work out because of the reasons I stated above or else because I don't even get an interview (trying to forget about Metro), then all hope is not lost. There will still be other opportunities that come up as the school year gets closer to starting.

Beginning of City of Bend Internship

If the first day is any indication, my City of Bend internship should be a lot like the one I had with the State of Connecticut - which is largely a good thing. I am more or less free to come and go when I please, just so long as Brian knows approximately which days I plan on working. He's given me three long term projects for me to look at and given me a choice of them. Here they are in terms of priority level for the City:

1. Work on "efficiency measures" within the current Urban Growth Boundary in Bend. Translation: the state wants to make sure that Bend has a plan to more better utilize space within it's existing boundaries before allowing it to develop in more land. The task given to me is somewhat complex and amorphous, so I am not quite sure how it will turn out.
2. The city currently holds the the Silver rating terms of bicycle friendliness according to the League of American Bicyclists, and for prestige purposes would like to advance to Gold. There's two years before the next round of re-ranking cities, so they'd like to find out how they can do that.
3. The city would like to designate certain street segments bike boulevards - bicycle routes along low speed, low stress residential streets so that people that are new to bicycling or don't want to deal with major roads have an alternative.

Of course among these possible projects, the less important they are, the easier for me they are to do due to my experience with city cycling while in Portland. I am not that big of a cyclist compared to the rest of my cohort in graduate school, but compared to the general public I am probably a bit of an advocate.

It will be fun to apply what I am learning in my graduate program to my hometown. There's something about the personal connection I have with Bend that makes what I will be working on that much more interesting.

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I completed my Air Transport class on Monday. My final grade was an A thanks to a 95 on my term paper and a 97.5 on the final exam. Prior to this I had figured I would be getting an an A- since that is predominantly the grade I had received on all the other assignments. I am quite pleased with the result considering how much trouble I had focusing on getting the paper done.

Working on the paper for the class made it clear that I am ready for my academic career to conclude or at the very least, a real break from school this summer. I want to be working again, making money, feeling like I can make advances with my life and not feel like I have to defer it all. Can't say that the job hunt phase has much appeal.

Internship with the City of Bend

All is not lost this summer; I have secured an internship with the City of Bend this summer. I will start on the week of the 18th and stay in Bend three days a week every other week until school starts. The other details, like the particular days as well as all of what I will be doing will be worked out later on.

Brian's positive response to my renewed interest in being a planning intern for them was definitely some welcome good news after a string of strike outs with respect to internships. I was interviewed by Washington County and ultimately not taken. Metro didn't even interview me and informed me via email of this just yesterday, when I already knew from talking to people that they were in the final process of picking which people they wanted to hire. On the flip side, working in Bend would be awesome, and this would help make that more of a possibility. Now, there are many obstacles to that, namely that finding jobs in Annie and my respective fields at the same time would be really tough.

Tracy, the Student Services Coordinator for my department at school, sent us a posting for an internship with David Evans and Associates. I was pretty floored initially since I would have loved to have gotten on with them here in Portland for the summer. My initial reaction quickly dissipated when I saw that they were open to students and recent grads. I know of really only a few recent grads from our program that have jobs which means that even had I not already committed to Bend, I would have been up against some fierce competition. I would like an internship; these guys need one.

This is the third week of my four week Air Transportation class. The class and the professor have grown on me, although I am still leery of the 10-12 page paper that I'll need to crank out soon. It's been nice to have a class with engineering students and to get a different perspective than what I get in the planning department. I think some of my problem with my fellow planning students is not with them as individuals but with the overall homogeneity of the group and lack of diversity in thought or views. Thus far this class has been interesting and rather than take GIS classes as electives next year I think I will shoot for some in Civil Engineering.

Washington County Planning

My "chat" with a few planners at Washington County went well for an intern position with the Current Planning division. Per Annie's suggestion, I dressed up like it was an interview and went in with the expectation that it would be closer to an interview than a chat as the email had stated. Thankfully, my preparedness paid off and I did fairly well in what was a two-person interview. One of the people, Nadine appeared to be in her 40's and been in the profession for awhile, and the other Dyami had only recently graduated from the MURP program and looked to be at most 30. I think that I would best describe the questions as Interview Light, as they were pretty straightforward and could have been read from my resume. I feel like I adequately and succinctly answered their, well mostly Nadine's questions, to the best of my abilities and felt comfortable after the first few moments. Some of the questions were almost kind of funny, like would I be willing to do general work around the office and my willingness to do other tasks. I had figured that those sorts of sometimes more menial tasks came with the territory, but I can imagine that not all Master's students are so willing to do that. Nadine told me that they either had two or three other people getting interviewed for what would be two positions and that I would be informed sometime next week and the start date would be the following week.

The one thing that I wish I would have answered differently would have been how many hours per week I was willing to work. Since it's not paid, and that's by far and away the biggest knock against it, I don't think I should burn up all my time this summer working for free. Rather than 30 hours per week, I think I should have said something along the lines that I would be willing to do up to 30 on occasion, but would much prefer 24 or 25 so I can pick up hours flyering or doing other things for the Family Activity Study to actually earn money.

The other concern I have for this internship is the timing of when they will decide on whether or not they want to take me. On Tuesday I turned in my application for the paid internship with Metro that I would prefer to have and likely won't hear back on that for an interview until sometime next week at the extreme earliest. If Nadine decides that I would be a good fit for the project at Washington County, which is quite possible given my decent interview and the small amount of competition, I will be forced to decide on that well before I know anything from Metro. I'd hate to accept an unpaid position but leave a paid one on the table.

Final Grades Spring 2011 Term

From an academic standpoint, this past term was my best thus far in the MURP program. Whether or not I have enjoyed it the most, or learned the most from it is debatable, but at least it's moving my GPA in the right direction. My GPA concerns are much smaller than they were when I was an undergrad because there is no additional schooling that I plan to do that is dependent on them. Heck, my near perfect undergraduate GPA was almost rendered meaningless by my lack of work experience when I went to apply to Master's programs.

Anyway, here are the grades:

USP 525 Design Analysis in Planning A-
USP 531 GIS for Planners A-
USP 537 Economics of Urban Transportation B+
USP 553 Legal Processes in Planning B+
USP 556 Urban Transportation: Problems & Policies A

Term GPA: 3.64
Overall GPA: 3.43

Angling for a Summer Internship

Finally, as the past few days it's actually felt like the month of June and the cusp of summer. Yesterday was the first day I donned shorts for a non-athletic activity; in Connecticut and especially in Virginia shorts weather came a lot sooner. Today it hit about 85, which felt rather sweltering, but in a welcome way given how I have been used to it being in the 50's. I think that I would be quite happy if the mercury never rose above 85 because other than water sports in cold water, it's just not necessary.

Competition can be a very good thing. It forces people, groups, companies to put forth their very best effort. Competition however can make things awkward around friends or acquaintances. For instance, talking with my fellow MURPs that are also trying to find a much coveted summer internship has been difficult. On one hand we work with one another on these incessant group projects, but now those of us without a summer internship lined up are all vying for the few remaining open positions. I had a conversation with Jake where he mentioned that he's applying for the unpaid Washington County position and then today Sarah brought up the paid Metro corridor planning position. I sort of have an in with Washington County since I had an informational interview with them in April and feel good about the fact that it's not likely that many members of my Portland-centric cohort will want to wander beyond the city limits. As for the Metro position, I will have two informational interview in the can and they actually do have a veteran's preference. That being said, there is going to be a lot of interest in the two slots that they have and I would especially have had a rough go of it had not so many people already committed to the summer in China program.

I have realized that these two official internships, and potentially hearing back from DEA most likely represent my last gasp at landing a Portland area internship for the summer. I emailed Scott Richman at DEA my updated references page since had asked for them in our informational interview and because he said something *might* come open. Despite the various things working against me, namely my colleagues that will no doubt be putting together excellent application packages, I must feel reasonably confident to entertain the worry that Washington County will interview me and offer me the position before I know if I have a chance with Metro or not as their due date isn't until June 14. I have been thankful that Brian with the City of Bend hasn't asked yet when I want to start so that I can buy time to find out how much time I can give to them. At the very least if he did ask me, I could slow walk it since there's no law stating that I need to start immediately upon the Spring quarter ending.

Two more weeks of Year 1

Somehow or another, I am almost there on year one of the Master of Urban & Regional Planning program at Portland State University. Looking back at all the homework, projects, papers, readings (well, the ones I did) and it seems like a lot more than a year has transpired. The pace though has been quite a rush and nowhere in any of my three terms did I get anything resembling an easing in period like I did on the semester system at Central Connecticut State University.

Here's the sorts of projects that I have remaining:

-GIS project on whether or not the paratransit bus service in this region is adequately distributing buses to meet the demands. Spoiler alert, they aren't and need to be reallocated away from the central garage

-A faux transportation policy memo on recommending toll roads to a new state legislator. This is an interesting case because Oregonians aren't used to tolls, so the acceptance level of tolls may not be great, even though it operates under the very libertarian principle that you pay for what you use.

-A paper for Transportation Economics that compares bus rapid transit, i.e. the New Britain-Hartford Busway to light rail. I haven't gotten too much work done on this, but I already know that the conclusion will be that it's not really a direct comparison and that BRT is better for smaller and more dispersed metropolitan areas.

-A group project for my Design Analysis class in which we recommend ways that the Hollywood neighborhood in Portland can densify. I appreciate the value of good designs and what will likely be the slick product that my team puts together however I wish that those sorts of things came more naturally to me.

Intermixed with all of this are three final exams, my continuing efforts to secure a local internship that is paid in addition to the gig I have lined up with the City of Bend and a very welcome Memorial Day Weekend trip with Annie to see my mom.

As a brief note on the professional front, I met with a planner for David Evans and Associates and got the impression that I'll be seriously considered for a forthcoming internship. The purpose of the meeting was an informational interview, to find out more about what he did and what DEA does but the questions and course of the conversation felt a lot more like an actual interview for a job.

My hope is that I'll hear from him in a couple of weeks and that it turns out that they have something. For the long term, my feeling is that I will be in better shape to get an additional local internship, particularly if it's for a firm or agency that I would ultimately like to work for.

Summer class conundrum

I am not sure if I should take a class or two during the summer session. Some of the benefits are clear, such as the fact that it won't be as much of a crunch to get all 72 credits in within the two-year program. Maximizing my veteran's benefits is a bit more convoluted since it would behoove me to take a few classes to do that however it is not entirely clear how much it would cost me in the short run. It's a little tough to make financial aid decisions when I can't forecast what my bill for the summer session would be.

The first strike against taking summer courses is the lack of interesting offerings available. In my own department there are only a few classes, and only two of them are remotely interesting. One is about Shrinking Cities, so the focus would likely be on Detroit, and the other is Real Estate Development. Neither topic is particularly relevant towards my interests. Under Civil Engineering I could take a class about Air Transportation which is a bit more in tune with what I get excited about.

The downer with any of those classes is that it would severely restrict the amount of time I have available to intern. This may not be a problem if I am only interning with the City of Bend. The scenario of my only internship being 160 miles away is not ideal and I am hopeful about finding one around here that's with an agency I'd actually like to work at. Thus far it's been pretty small towns, or else non-profits.

Friday Telecommute

Today I am making a point of not going to campus. I can do today's tasks here at home, and besides I have to go in tomorrow anyway for E-bike research. This term has barely started and I am already finding myself spending anywhere from 8-10 hours there, even if classes only last for about half of that time.

This term is a little different than last term. There are much fewer group projects, and there are more small assignments in lieu of large projects. I still have a term paper in Transportation Economics, but I know what he's expecting, so it won't be that bad. Particularly with GIS, it means there will always be much work that needs to be done in the near future. It's also different because a few people have asked me for help or came to me with questions regarding homework or classwork this term. The last two terms this was not the case since our work was primarily papers and memorandums, where the writing skills of my classmates really put me to shame.

I am discovering quite a bit of overlap between my two transportation classes this term. I also have noticed that quite a few of the concepts we are covering were already covered in the Transportation Finance class I took last term. This has gotten me to reconsider what sorts of electives I take next year and question the value of additional transportation courses. Odds are if I took more for instance, land use classes, that I would learn more new things than I would if I stuck just to my transportation specialization. This isn't to say that I have nothing more to learn about transportation, rather that if I want to learn more I will have to do it outside of an academic setting.

I did notice that this time the attendance numbers were smaller and that a higher percentage of them were female. Prior to my cohort, PSU has always skewed strongly female. For my group, they consciously tried to accept more male students, which had the side effect of making admitted students in the Transportation specialization outnumber all the others. Perhaps this time around they want a better balance amongst the specializations so we don't have a case like now where only two people are in Regional Economic Development. I also thought that the low apparent attendance was surprising given how they are trying to expand the program. Perhaps there's a greater share of students that would be coming from out of the region and thus weren't able to afford to fly out and visit. One of the second-year MURPs brought up a good point about maintaining the quality of the program; that continuing the program's reputation in effect strengthens the credentials that we will have obtained. I think this is mostly true, although in say, five or six years I bet my actual work experience will be far more important then the fact that I have a MURP degree from Portland State.

Spring Term

Today will mark the last academic day of Week 1 of the Spring Term. My classes this term are much different than the two previous terms at Portland State. Rather than only 3 or 4 credit classes, I have a 1 credit class and 2 credit class this time around. That means that my five classes only add up to 13 credits. It doesn't appear that this term will be quite as much work as last term was (I may regret writing this), however it does mean that it will test my ability to balance out that many competing interests in addition to doing good work for my Graduate Research Assistantship.

Classes this term:

• Legal Processes In Planning
• GIS for Planners
• Economics of Urban Transportation
• Urban Transportation: Problems & Policies
• Design Analysis in Planning

One of the key differences from the last two terms is that three of my five instructors are adjuncts. Hopefully their additional viewpoints will round out those I have experienced from the School of Urban Studies & Planning's faculty. Another difference is that three of these classes aren't part of the MURP core curriculum and there are a lot of non-planning students and even in one instance, undergraduates. This grad/undergrad split became very apparent when Jennifer, the instructor and my advisor, had to field a question from a student regarding what exactly peer-reviewed meant; she had thought it meant to get a class peer to review our memos prior to turning them in.

Usually there is a class each term that surprises me because it is more interesting than I had expected it to be. This term I think it very well might be my Legal Processes in Planning class. Last term I got frustrated in a few courses because they got a little too focused on hypotheticals and were not grounded in the real world pragmatic dealings that we need to be prepared for. This instructor is a lawyer with a local firm, but has been city and county attorney, so he knows both sides of land use disputes. The class was three hours long, yet considering the material, it actually went by reasonably fast.

This class got me to thinking about how I had considered applying to law school to focus in land use law. Really, I had been thinking about it in conjunction with a Master's degree in planning. This program is short enough that it's in my best interest to finish it up, work for a few years in the field, and then determine if I still have an interest in land use law. The problem with getting an additional higher education degree is that by the time I would be doing it, I would need to support a family and a house, and moving to law school might be problematic. I would also have to do a cost-benefit analysis and see if the extra income above what I would make as a practicing planner would be worth taking myself out of the workforce for 3 years and for incurring more debt.

I have also had my eye towards summer internships. To that end I have been in the process of revamping my resume, which is challenging, but highly necessary given that I have gained a lot of relevant experiences in the last year and a half. Once I think that I have one that is good to go, then I will start contacting some of the people that my mentor, Jason Gately at the Port of Portland, recommended I contact to see if they could host an intern. At the very least I have the one lined up with the City of Bend however it can't suffice due to how far away it is. Plus, I would benefit from getting experience from a different type of agency, or at least different type of public jurisdiction.