Carolina Planning Journal

Bridging Theory and Practice Since 1974

Tag: Internship

Reflecting on a Summer of Planning

August 22, 2023 /

This summer, Carolina Planning Master’s students participated in a range of in-person and remote opportunities across the country. This week, we are sharing highlights and reflections from four students.

Jasmine Davidson – MCRP 2024, Land Use & Environmental Planning
Planning Intern, Clarion Associates
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

I began my planning internship at Clarion Associates this summer, where I have worked on a variety of planning and zoning projects. I got to see the many stages of the planning process: from early stakeholder meetings, to comprehensive plan drafting, to incorporating a client’s feedback into the final product. For one of these projects, I collected case studies of rural and suburban communities in North Carolina and Virginia that are implementing the types of changes we were recommending for our client — changes like supporting a range of housing options in growth areas, facilitating building re-use, and connecting street networks. It was a cool project, and a good reminder that plenty of good and interesting planning is happening in small communities — it’s not just the big cities! My experience at Clarion has also been shaped by its size — Clarion is a small firm, so I was able to build strong interpersonal relationships with coworkers at all levels, which has been gratifying. I’m excited to continue working for Clarion this fall!

Jen Farris – MCRP & MPH 2024, Transportation
Public Health Practicum Student & Research Assistant, Orange County Home Preservation Coalition & UNC CH Highway Safety Research Center
Virtual/Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Orange County Home Preservation Coalition: For my public health practicum, I worked with Dr. Ryan Lavalley to conduct a program evaluation for the Orange County Home Preservation Coalition (OCHPC). OCHPC is made up of a group of partner organizations that work together to preserve, repair, and modify homes so homeowners can continue living in them comfortably and safely. The program evaluation will include researching the impacts of weatherization and HVAC retrofits on homeowner health, surveying Coalition service recipients and Coalition partners to understand program strengths and challenges, and integrating a racial equity lens throughout the evaluation.

Highway Safety Research Center: I am supporting a research project exploring nighttime pedestrian injuries and fatalities on urban arterial roadways. This summer, I have been conducting a lit review for who is most at risk of experiencing a serious or fatal pedestrian crash at night.

Lauren Caffe – MCRP 2024, Land Use & Environmental Planning
Project Assistant, FB Environmental Associates
Portland/Camden, Maine

FB Environmental is facilitating a citizen’s advisory committee in Camden, Maine that is working on making recommendations to help with resilience of the local watershed. My role as Project Assistant is to help with public outreach and community engagement by interviewing people in the area to ask what they know or don’t know about the project, their concerns, what they value and would like to see happen, and help explain what the advisory committee is doing. I’ve also been attending the Town and Committee meetings, creating outreach materials such as the monthly newsletter and newspaper releases, organizing events, and helping the Project Managers through this exciting, challenging, and interesting project!

Abby Cover – MCRP 2024, Land Use & Environmental Planning
Student Researcher, UNC CH Highway Safety Research Center
Virtual

This summer I technically worked at two internships: a niche planning internship at a large consulting firm, and student research assistant at HSRC (UNC’s highway safety research center). I made the decision very quickly in my first internship at the consulting firm that I was not a good fit, and began looking for alternatives. The firm’s administrative process was very messy, and the work was so far outside my skillset with minimal support, that I decided I could better spend my time almost anywhere else.

I cold-emailed many places, asking if they had any available internships, since it was already June by the time I decided to leave the large consulting firm. I assumed there would be no more available internships, but I was wrong! I quickly found work with HSRC where I researched the Safe System approach to transit planning, and crafting public facing visualizations.   

Everybody at HSRC could not have been nicer, I recommend anybody interested in transportation planning even a little bit reach out to them for work. If I had gone with my original assumptions while at my original internship, I would have never worked at HSRC. I learned most of all to always advocate for yourself, and never assume what you can otherwise confirm. If you are not happy with your internship, you are not stuck!

Featured image: https://planning.unc.edu/visit-us/

Reflecting on a Summer of Planning

September 30, 2021 /

This summer, Carolina Planning Master’s students participated in a range of in-person and remote opportunities across the country. This week, we are sharing highlights and reflections from eight students.

Sam Stites – MCRP 2022, Economic Development
Labor Organizing Fellow, NC Raise UP/Fight for $15 (Brevard, NC)

Labor rights are central to promoting the sustainability, health, and well-being of our communities and the broader economy, yet are often overlooked in economic development by actors who hold power. This is perhaps most true in North Carolina, recently designated as the worst state for worker protections, wages, and the right to organize unions using metrics gathered by Oxfam. In seeking to learn more about the challenges faced by labor at large and locally, I was grateful to join NC Raise Up as a Fellow in their 2021 Organizing Academy based in Western North Carolina. The North Carolina arm of the national ‘Fight for $15,’ NC Raise Up provided fellows with the training and education to organize fast food and grocery store workers through direct engagement. Through this work, I spoke with dozens of workers for whom wage theft, harassment, and unsafe work conditions are the rule, not the exception. I also had the opportunity to work with dozens of seasoned labor organizers and organizations, who inspired me to wear movement work on my front sleeve. Ultimately, we documented unfair labor practices, mobilized entire workplaces, delivered strike notices, and cultivated solidarity. I left proud, focused, and equipped to address labor in school and beyond.

Henry Read – MCRP 2022, Land Use & Environmental Planning
Planning Intern, Piedmont Triad Regional Council (Kernersville, NC)

My time at the Piedmont Triad Regional Council gave me the opportunity to experience a wide range of planning work. Nearly every week provided a new challenge, from rewriting small towns’ zoning codes to comply with new state standards to mapping the amenities available at regional blueways’ access points, to assembling an ADA inspection best practices guide and kit bag for PTRC to use after I returned to school. The team at PTRC was very gracious in providing support and advice, but also gave me free rein to pick my assignments and tackle them as I saw fit. I even got to speak to town councils and at public events as an official representative of the Council of Government, which was an intimidating and gratifying privilege. It feels great to know I made a lasting contribution to many Peidmont communities through my efforts. And I am definitely going to get a lot of use out of the new Legacy Trails blueway map!

Lauren Prunkl – MCRP 2022, Transportation
Transportation Planning Intern, Kittelson & Associates (Virtual)

During my summer internship at Kittelson & Associates, I enjoyed jumping in on several different projects. One that has stood out was a corridor study in and around Tampa, FL. Last semester, I completed a semester-long corridor study project with a classmate for school regarding a road connecting Durham and Chapel Hill, NC. It was great to be involved throughout the summer with the Tampa project and see how these types of projects take shape in practice. I didn’t expect to learn so much about the Florida Department of Transportation’s (DOT) policies and processes for implementation such as Context Classification and Complete Streets. I had the opportunity to assist with the Context Classification process for the existing conditions phase of the corridor study project as well as see how Complete Streets can be implemented through the Resurfacing, Restoration, and Rehabilitation (RRR) process for example. I learned a ton about transportation consulting which gave me new perspectives regarding the relationship between consultants and DOTs since I had previously interned in the local non-profit and government spaces which operate quite differently.

Pierce Holloway – MCRP 2022, Land Use & Environmental Planning
Team Lead, NASA Develop (Virtual)

This past summer, I had the awesome opportunity to serve as a Team Lead for a group of 4 analysts investigating Urban Heat Island (UHI) impacts in Fairfax County, Virginia. My position had me responsible for delegating tasks within the team as well as running communication between partners, analysts, and science advisors. We used remote sensing data to compute land surface temperature, albedo, canopy cover, and land use which was fed into the INVEST Urban cooling model to determine heat mitigation index values for the entire county. We also investigated socio-demographic data for local populations to determine where vulnerable populations are located in relation to areas experiencing the worst UHI impacts.

Josephine Justin – MCRP 2023, Land Use & Environmental Planning
Fellow, Climate Action Corps/City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA)

I spent this summer in Los Angeles as a California Climate Corps Fellow working with the City of LA’s new Climate Emergency Mobilization Office (CEMO). As a fellow, I worked with the director of the office to ensure that City climate policies are built on equity and justice and avoid unintended consequences. Additionally, we worked to facilitate the voices of the Community Assemblies and the Climate Emergency Commission and to innovate governance strategies to ensure communities and equitable solutions are at the heart of the City’s climate strategy. Finally, we coordinated and collaborated with City leaders to achieve the goals of LA’s Green New Deal.

Katie Burket – MCRP 2022, Housing & Community Development
Planning Intern, Charlotte Planning, Design & Development (Virtual)

This summer I started an internship with Charlotte Planning, Design, & Development and will continue to work with them throughout the academic year. I am working with the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) team, and they are just about to release a draft of their new UDO for public comment so the department has been busy and moving quickly. Many of my tasks so far have been with the community engagement team trying to think through the planning of community events to communicate about the UDO. It has been a great experience so far and I’ve learned a lot about the processes involved in local government planning. I believe this internship is offered every year, and I would highly recommend it to any planning students looking to get some general planning experience!

Emma Vinella-Brusher – MCRP/MPH 2023, Transportation/Health Behavior
Low Income Fare Pilot Intern, District Department of Transportation/The Lab @ DC (Virtual)

As part of the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) internship program, I was placed with The Lab @ DC, a data science/social science/civic design team within the Mayor’s Office. I was the only staff member working full-time on the city’s Low-Income Fare Pilot Program, so my job was to get the study ready for an early 2022 kickoff. This included making recommendations regarding gathering community input, establishing data-sharing agreements and MOUs, enrolling residents receiving government assistance, and collecting participant mobility data. The results of the study will help WMATA understand the impact of low- or no-fare transit on the health and well-being of low-income DC residents. It was a very busy but enriching summer, and I thoroughly appreciated getting exposure to two different DC government agencies. I recommend this internship program for anyone interested in transportation planning and/or local government!

Florence Dwyer – MCRP 2021, Transportation
Intern, District Department of Transportation (Virtual)

Over the summer, I worked virtually with DDOT (District Department of Transportation) on various freight-related projects in the District. My main project was to create a policy and operational framework that is data-driven and equitable to determine where automated enforcement cameras for truck restrictions could best be deployed. I researched best practices from other jurisdictions to inform this project. Another task I am currently working on is researching e-cargo bike pilot programs.

By Amy Patronella

Featured image courtesy of Pexels

Transportation consulting: A summer at Fehr & Peers in Los Angeles

September 5, 2019 /

As a Master’s Student studying transportation planning, I was fortunate to intern at Fehr & Peers Transportation Consultants in Los Angeles, California this summer. It was a jam-packed three months of learning, exploring, and new experiences.

The commute alone exposed me to large-scale transit operations and active transportation infrastructure. I was able to commute to my downtown internship via the Metro Expo Line (light rail) or by bicycle facilities such as the Figueroa protected bike lane which I wrote about here. Los Angeles is known for its congestion and car culture, but many of my colleagues at the office also took transit, biked, or walked to the office from across the city. They are transportation consultants of course! 

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Tory with LADOT’s Vision Zero partners.

The position was great for exposure to transportation consultancy. Fehr & Peers is a mid-size transportation consulting firm with several offices, primarily along the West Coast. The Los Angeles office housed 35+ employees, making it one of the largest offices in the firm, but still small enough for me to be able to meet and work with almost everyone in my office. 

Work at Fehr & Peers is more skill-based than department-based, so almost every employee (especially interns and entry-level employees) works on most current projects. Whether pitching in to edit a final report, or initiating the traffic impact analysis process, employees and interns are exposed to a variety of work. Autonomy and communication are highly valued at Fehr & Peers. Both were especially important for my work experience as almost everyone in my office delegated a task to me at some point during my time there. One person consulted on my workload and hours, but everyone else was my manager at one time or another due to task or work load. This work culture builds a strong sense of teamwork while also valuing autonomy. I loved this work style as it also removed hierarchy and rank barriers. I could as easily chat or setup a meeting with an entry-level employee as a Principal in the firm. 

My internship work varied each week as I assisted with a number of tasks across projects. In consulting, project work is won, and time is primarily dedicated to project work through billable hours. I spent the majority of my time working on billable projects, but also spent significant time on research and development through the firm’s discipline groups, and market research. Memorable billable project work included LA DOT’s Vision Zero Avalon Corridor Open House with about 1,000 community members highlighting needed safety improvements along a six mile stretch of Avalon. Other memorable projects included fieldwork for 80+ intersections, Complete Streets Safety Assessment reports, and reviewing data and preparing resources for a large private development’s traffic impact analysis. 

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Tory hiking in Topanga State Park with Fehr & Peers colleagues.

The internship experience solidified my desire to work in transportation consulting post-graduation, and especially what type of firm. I prefer small to mid-size firms for their ability to be more niche, to focus on employee development through work on a variety of projects, and the ability to really connect with colleagues across all offices. This approach is employee driven, which builds a community of passionate and highly-skilled transportation professionals who work hard to see their projects, their client’s goals, and the industry succeed.

About the Author: Tory is a second-year master’s candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning with a concentration in Transportation Planning. A passionate advocate for accessibility in transportation, she actively promotes access and multimodal transportation as a volunteer and former board member of the Raleigh bicycle advocacy group, Oaks & Spokes, and Co-Facilitator of Plan for All. Tory received her undergraduate degree in Nonprofit Management and Fundraising from Indiana University. In her free time, she enjoys bicycle camping.

Addressing Climate Change with the Federal Government: A Summer at Golden Gate National Recreation Area

August 31, 2019 /

My experience this summer was a bit different than that of most students finishing their first year of a doctoral program. Rather than sticking around to do research, I headed out West as part of a program designed to give students the opportunity to work on pressing climate change-related management challenges with the National Park Service (NPS).

The Future Park Leaders of Emerging Change (FPL) is a program of the NPS Climate Change Response Program; it’s at its heart a program to recruit young talent to Federal Service. Students – we ranged from undergraduate rising seniors to a newly minted PhD – spend their summer at different national park units or offices around the country working on twelve-week research and management projects. The program culminates with a professional development symposium at the end of the summer where we were able to meet staff from across the Department of the Interior (DOI) at all stages of their careers working on climate change issues from one angle or another. We spent the week in Fort Collins at the Climate Change Response Program headquarters talking about federal climate change research, job opportunities in DOI, and all the tips-and-tricks for connecting with federal employment (and dealing with its unique challenges).

Leah 1

The Professional Development Symposium in August in Fort Collins was an opportunity for all program participants to learn more about DOI jobs and federal service, but also a chance for us to meet each other in-person and hear about all our different projects (and a chance to go hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park!).

The other primary goal of the FPL program if to help individual national park units or offices get valuable and much needed assistance with critical management challenges. This year, there were ten of us placed all over, from the high country of Mt. Rainier to watery Biscayne National Park in south Florida. One student was working on acquiring a Dark Sky Certification for Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park. Another was developing a bacterial water quality citizen science monitoring program at swampy Congaree National Park in South Carolina. Two students were in Arizona – one using tree cores to develop a historical record of snowfall in arid Saguaro National Park and another assessing erosion risk to cultural resources in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument right on the Mexican border. Other projects included assessing the extent and impact of coral disease, developing climate change vulnerability metrics at historical parks in the Northeast, and building a predictive model for historical cultural resources in collaboration with a local native tribe. The diversity of projects reflects the diversity of park needs and challenges, as well as the diversity of students the program is trying to recruit.

My project was to develop a formal protocol and standard operating procedures for monitoring shoreline change and coastal topography at Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) in California’s Bay Area. Coastal parks around the country are increasingly threatened by sea level rise and climate change-driven flooding, which poses a threat to park infrastructure, facilities, and natural resources. But these challenges are particularly acute at GGNRA, where the park’s sandy beaches typically abut semi-urban development and draw some of the largest crowds in the national park system. In addition, GGNRA is unique in that it’s not one contiguous park. Rather, it’s a conglomeration of various units – and various jurisdictions as a result – across the region, from Silicon Valley up to Pt. Reyes. These challenges limit the potential of landward migration of park infrastructure and ecosystems and restricts the use of other traditional adaptation strategies, particularly at some of the park’s more remote sites.

These are very urgent problems the park has been grappling with for years. The challenges are most obvious at the beaches of Marin County: Stinson, Muir, and Rodeo. Stinson, in particular, has been identified as one of the communities in the Bay Area most vulnerable to sea level rise and climate change-driven flooding. Just last year, the nearby creek overtopped its banks and flooded the entire parking lot, blowing through a new opening in the dunes along the beach. However, despite recent studies, information is still limited on the geomorphic processes – sediment supply, erosion, beach migration – at play at these beaches. This information gap severely limits the park’s planning and coastal adaptation efforts. In response, the park’s 2017 Resource Stewardship Strategy identified the development of a Marin County beach geomorphology program as a high priority.

Leah 2

The parking lot at Stinson Beach is still unusable after flooding in April 2018 from the nearby creek destroyed a section of the parking lot and blew a new opening in the dunes.

That’s where I came in. Having reliable data on shoreline position and seasonal and annual variation in beach width will help park staff calculate shoreline migration, erosion rates, and sediment supply, which can, in turn, inform coastal management and adaptation efforts. Although park staff had been doing some topography monitoring at Muir Beach since 2012 (in response to creek and lagoon restoration), it was in an ad hoc manner, and they hadn’t had the time to do the involved work required to develop a comprehensive monitoring protocol to ensure that data collected year-to-year is consistent. As such, my objectives included assessing the park’s existing monitoring efforts, becoming familiar with similar protocols from other parks, and formalizing a protocol that incorporates best practices, but also meets park needs and accommodates existing resources.

The first step was data collection, which also provided me an opportunity to learn about the technology and different surveying techniques. Using similar protocols from within the park system and from the USGS, who have been doing this kind of monitoring in San Francisco since 2004, I was able to refine and formalize our existing approach. Then, I tested my methods by collecting another year’s worth of data at Muir Beach and pilot data, to establish baseline conditions, at Stinson Beach.

Leah 3

The actual process of data collection involved setting up a base GPS station (left) that communicates both with overhead satellites and a roving GPS station, which I carry using a retrofitted backpack (right) as I walk up and down the beach, collecting elevation and position data at different points.

After data collection, I developed analysis techniques and products for Muir and Stinson Beaches that would be both useful and usable by the park and partner organizations. Using Excel, ArcGIS, and specialized survey software, I developed plots and maps showing landward shoreline migration, cross-sectional beach morphology, and elevation loss. I also developed templates to make the analysis simple as monitoring is initiated at additional sites in the future.

Leah 4

An example of one of the plots we created using the data collected shows the annual migration of the beach shoreline (roughly, the mean high water mark) at Muir Beach since 2012.

The primary product of this project, though, was the protocol itself. The protocol outlines the conceptual framework, overarching objectives, and sampling and analysis design of the monitoring program. It’s a high-level document meant to broadly guide monitoring efforts and inform any future decision-making as questions, technology, and management paradigms evolve. The SOPs are more specific. They contain step-by-step instructions for mission planning, conducting the survey, analysis and reporting, and data management. These are to ensure that data is collected and managed in a formal, reliable manner year-to-year to ensure consistency between surveys and facilitate inter-survey comparisons of data.

It’ll take a few years until the impact of the protocol will actually be felt by GGNRA staff. They are taking it out in September to essentially give it a test-run. The hope is that an intern, with limited familiarity with this equipment and these sites, is able to pick up my document and both collect reliable, accurate data and do all the analyses and reporting that follows. Hopefully, in a few years, they’ll have enough survey data to have a solid enough grasp of the local geomorphology that they can then get to addressing the real challenge of using that information to make difficult decisions for the people, facilities, and ecosystems of GGNRA in an era of climate change.

About the Author: Leah Campbell is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, where she focuses on integrating equity and resilience into climate adaptation to address urban flooding. Prior to UNC, she worked in the environmental nonprofit sector in California advocating for progressive water quality and coastal resilience.

Featured Image: Rodeo Beach in Marin County, California where the Natural Resources Division of Golden Gate National Recreation Area is based (and where I was paid to live for three months!).

Carolina Planning, the oldest student-run planning publication in the country, is produced once a year in UNC's Department of City and Regional Planning. Articles selected for the journal are written by academics and practitioners, covering a wide range of topics relevant to today’s planning challenges.

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