By KEN PARK
The Enterprise
Checking in on the Insitu Internship program, we find them not working in their individual departments but working together with Washington Gorge Action Programs (WGAP) on a service project at the Guided Pathways housing project.
“We do this every year with the college and high school interns,” said Community Relations Coordinator Tammy Kaufman. “It’s not only a teaching opportunity for the interns to show that service is part of working for Insitu, but also an opportunity for Insitu itself to give back to the community.”
This year Insitu partnered with WGAP to do some minor cosmetic repairs and landscaping at the Guided Pathways Homeless Shelter and Housing Assistance project located just outside of Bingen. Kevin Summa is the project lead from WGAP; he directs the interns on the projects being worked on during the service day.
“It was almost overwhelming to see how many of these young people came to help and how quickly they just got to work. This is the first year we’ve done this with Insitu so I wasn’t sure what to expect,” said Summa.
Guided Pathways has been in its location off Wind Ranch Road since 1995. The program provides rental assistance for low-income families, a 30-day free-stay home-less shelter, and currently has eight homes for perm-anent residents with low income.
“The goal of Guided Pathways is to get people into good homes beyond what we can provide for them, but we are a really good starting point,”said Summa.
The Insitu summer interns were tasked with cleaning up some of the landscape in front of the rental properties, as well as repainting some of the residences and the shelter, among other small cosmetic repairs.
The camaraderie between the interns was apparent as they consistently joked with each other while working together; you wouldn’t know that many of them work in very different departments, or are from different places, until you ask.
The culture of Insitu encourages the interns and employees to communicate with people in all departments, which creates a friendlier atmosphere in the work environment. They do this through group lunches and after-hours activities.
Stacie, a college intern from North Carolina in the Mechanical Engineering department, said she enjoys going on to the “gear shed,” where she can rent a kite-board and go out on the water with others after work. She enjoys the fact that during the day she is getting a real world work experience in a field she is interested in.
This was not only an opportunity for the students to do some service work but also an opportunity to get to know one another a little better.
Josue, an intern from the University of Florida in the Software department, expressed appreciation for the networking aspect of the internship, which he hopes will benefit him after college when pursuing a career.
“I’m really excited to see if the projects I have been helping to work on, some of them brand new, will pan out before I go back to Miami,” said Josue.
While many of the interns were from all over the country, there were also locals like Isaac Hollenberry, a high school intern from Hood River’s Horizon Christian School, involved in the project.
“I’ve been learning a lot in the Information Technology department. I already had some IT experience but this has definitely given me new skills,” said Hollenberry. “I’ve mostly been working on an ‘in-house’ Wikipedia page to solve simple IT problems so people don’t have to call IT all the time,” laughed Hollenberry.
The interns still have two to four weeks left in their internships and the next week will be very exciting as Insitu will mark 1 million flight hours on Aug. 2 by hosting a company-wide press event in Arlington, Ore., to demonstrate the take off and release of their Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, as well as in Bingen, where CEO Ryan Hartman will speak.
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