Well, I was skimming through the Fed Players series – a joint project of the Washington Post and the Partnership for Public Service – and was happy to see that they had profiled Rachel Volke, an intern at Health and Human Services. Here’s what Rachel said about her internship:
[Rachel was] involved in a variety of projects, including helping research and write a report related to the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus in parts of the Southern Hemisphere. Assigned to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Volke has participated in many aspects of policy development and program management aimed at addressing public health. She has attended senior level policy meetings, researched public health issues and benefited from the kind of experience that no college course could accurately convey.
“I was so happy and grateful to be included in meaningful work because I’d heard stories from congressional and legislative interns who were primarily doing reception work,” Volke said. “But for me to have the opportunity to do work beyond the administrative and be able to contribute directly to the mission has been an amazing experience.”
Read the full profile here.
The article also mentions that HHS “is one of dozens of federal agencies offering internships” and that “many of the department’s internship positions are filled by graduate and doctoral students.”
That leads me to a couple concerns:
- Recent actions by the Merit Systems Protection Board have effectively killed the Federal Career Internship Program, which will be replaced by something called Pathways…but is yet to be defined.
- Some sources have indicated that graduate-level students may not be as heavily recruited in favor of younger, undergraduate prospects.
So I’d like to ask a couple questions:
1) What would your agency/organization do without its interns?
2) What if Federal programs emphasized undergraduate over graduate or doctoral students?
Our interns Fellows rock, by the way. I look forward to your feedback.
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