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.