Internship
Vega State Park requires a variety of interns, ranging from dedicated Park Ranger, to dedicated Interpretive Programs Director, to a jack-of-all trades weekly rotation of all duties. The set of duties I was hired for was the jack-of-all trades position, rotating between Entrance Station, Visitor Center, Park Ranger, and Maintenance. This wide variety of tasks kept me from getting bored with any one task and always gave me a fresh week of experiences.
Interns for Vega State Park must be enrolled in a university under an applicable major. They must also be willing to live more than an hour from the nearest major city with limited to no internet or cell service for the duration of the Summer.
Housing is provided on the park at a four-bedroom seasonal house set up for the interns of the park. The housing costs $40 per pay-period (every two weeks), totaling an average of just over $80 per month. The pay is the state minimum wage, currently set to $12.10 an hour, forty hours a week. The location comes with ample opportunity to fish, hike, or even borrow one of the park's canoes or kayaks to enjoy the lake. The staff is rather small, so one would have plenty of opportunity to get to know and become known by the full-time staff of the park, a very useful set of connections.
Through this internship I have learned about he ebbs and flows of traffic to a remote state park, how an organization enforces its regulations through both active and preventative measures, and how to operate heavy machinery, launch boats, and other practical in-the-field skills. The largest project I tackled on my own was disassembling twelve picnic tables that were no longer in use, using their parts to replace and repair parts of tables throughout the park, constructing four new picnic tables and deploying them in the park using a tractor. I also worked to remove, repair, and/or replace multiple wooden fences around the campgrounds.
Interns for Vega State Park must be enrolled in a university under an applicable major. They must also be willing to live more than an hour from the nearest major city with limited to no internet or cell service for the duration of the Summer.
Housing is provided on the park at a four-bedroom seasonal house set up for the interns of the park. The housing costs $40 per pay-period (every two weeks), totaling an average of just over $80 per month. The pay is the state minimum wage, currently set to $12.10 an hour, forty hours a week. The location comes with ample opportunity to fish, hike, or even borrow one of the park's canoes or kayaks to enjoy the lake. The staff is rather small, so one would have plenty of opportunity to get to know and become known by the full-time staff of the park, a very useful set of connections.
Through this internship I have learned about he ebbs and flows of traffic to a remote state park, how an organization enforces its regulations through both active and preventative measures, and how to operate heavy machinery, launch boats, and other practical in-the-field skills. The largest project I tackled on my own was disassembling twelve picnic tables that were no longer in use, using their parts to replace and repair parts of tables throughout the park, constructing four new picnic tables and deploying them in the park using a tractor. I also worked to remove, repair, and/or replace multiple wooden fences around the campgrounds.