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.