Cue the confetti
Musings from the NEMAC Fall 2018 interns
UNC Asheville’s NEMAC has existed for 15 years now—cue the confetti—and if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that we couldn’t have made it this far without our robust internship program. We’ve employed well over 100 students in our time on UNC Asheville’s campus, and the majority of our current staff interned with us as undergraduates. We quite literally owe most of our work to the dedication of our students! You can read some of the Medium posts they’ve penned for us, like Anitra Griffin’s Summer Intern W3b-Dev @ {NEMAC}, Metis Meloche’s Making Maps for Fun and Profit: A NEMAC Internship, and Santiago Bonilla’s Opening new doors.
Interning with us can be a big job.
NEMAC doesn’t employ students to simply enrich of their university experience or so that we have warm bodies standing at a counter. We have a mountain of work that we often don’t have enough hands to tackle, and our students work alongside our staff to get real-world experience in their fields. Our students work in live web development environments, interface with clients at public meetings, and help to shape the face of what NEMAC does.
The end of each semester can be a hectic time, especially in December. Despite exams, graduation, travel, and family, we were able to convince three of our interns who haven’t written a post to talk about their experiences. Without further ado…
Allyson Alvis
Community Resilience Narrative Writer | Dual major in Mass Communication and History
To say my last semester at UNCA was a roller coaster would be an understatement, and my internship with NEMAC is no exception. This is not to say the internship was stressful—honestly the worst part of it was trying to fit the hours into my increasingly busy schedule—it kind of just went through waves of confusion.
For the first month, I can honestly say I had no idea what I was doing. I mostly just played around in the Climate Resilience Toolkit a lot and read a lot of the articles therein. When given a concrete task, like organizing a spreadsheet of all the case studies, I moved really quickly through the task, but would get distracted by interesting stories. And though my first project—reading a lot of articles and writing ledes to summarize them—didn’t pan out into anything productive, it did help me familiarize myself with the website and understand how the articles work.
After working here a while, Nina solidified her direction with a team of federal experts in the Great Lakes region to work on a launch of a new region-specific section of the website—which also allowed me to adapt some case studies for the CRT. Mostly this meant re-reading the same piece of writing several times and trying to condense 3,000 words of scientific jargon into something people could actually read, and hopefully would want to do so.
Once I was adapting case studies, my role as an intern felt a lot more clear. All I had to do was write and try to match the style of the CRT as a whole—and reading so many case studies earlier in the semester helped with that. It felt like I was finally putting my “Narrative Writing Intern” title to good use, and it also felt like I was finally using my Mass Communication degree outside of classes.
I don’t know how much this internship will impact my future after I graduate. If I continue in journalism, which I hope to , having adaptations on a government website is sure to help my portfolio. If I go on a different path, like…oh, I don’t know…becoming a massage therapist, it might be a bit less relevant. Either way, it was a positive experience and I am really glad to have done it, no matter how stressed or busy I was. I made some great connections and got to work with some amazing people.
Thanks for a fabulous, chaotic, last semester.
Evie Hilton
GIS Intern | Computer Science major
As a post-baccalaureate student with a background in environmental science and forestry, returning to school for a second degree in computer science at UNC Asheville has been an interesting experience. I wasn’t sure what to expect in attending a liberal arts college and studying computer science…but it has exceeded any expectations I may have had. One of the greatest surprises for me was stumbling upon NEMAC, since I didn’t think that I would find work that utilized my background and experience in GIS.
I’ve been working with NEMAC for a few months now. My main focus has been on the Coastal Resilience Assessment of the U.S. coastline that we’ve been working on in collaboration with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), which aims to identify natural areas that can be developed into more resilient landscapes (read more about this project in Kim Rhodes’ A behind-the-scenes look at assessing coastal exposure). It’s an enormous project with a great number of analyses that go into each piece—the project identifies different aspects of social vulnerability as well as environmental threats. Most of my work has focused on taking a lot of smaller pieces and creating what the assessment calls “resilience hubs.” The assessment divides the coastal U.S. into regions to make the analysis easier; I created hubs for the South Atlantic, Gulf Coast, and California regions that were included in the final model—an analysis that ranks the hubs on several variables.
Now that the hubs project is coming to a close, I’ve been able to shift my focus to an analysis of Puerto Rico, an area recently devastated by multiple hurricanes. People want to know what its future looks like, and I am so pleased to be working with NEMAC to try and answer those questions.
I’m excited to continue working with NEMAC and to gain more skills in environmental analysis and my current studies.
Lindsey Nystrom
GIS Intern | Undeclared major
The most common piece of advice I got before beginning my first semester of college was to “take things slow,” or “just focus on academics.” Being the stubborn person that I am, I ignored all that and jumped into a plethora of new activities. I started gardening, going to Political Science Club, and visiting tourist spots around Asheville…but none of it felt right, so I kept exploring. Then came the part-time jobs fair. I saw the words “Geospatial Science” when I passed the NEMAC stand on the quad of UNCA. I was immediately reminded of the many hours I spent in high school analyzing land cover or modeling pollution flow, but more importantly of how much I loved and missed it. I decided to apply for the GIS Internship, and immediately went back to my dorm to work on the application.
After my first job interview ever, I was fortunate enough to be given a position at NEMAC. I started the internship with exploration and familiarization of the projects that had already been done, particularly the regional Coastal Resilience Assessment reports from the NFWF Coastal Resilience Assessment of the U.S. Once I was fairly comfortable with the data, I moved on to actual mapping (yay!). The goal is to expand those reports beyond the continental United States, so my focus was Puerto Rico. My first ever map with NEMAC was Social Vulnerability of Puerto Rico. From there I was focused and motivated, loving all of the work I was doing. I continued to work with Puerto Rico, making layers for Drainage, Erosion, Areas of Low Slope, Critical Infrastructure, and Beaches and Dunes.
In between all of that I worked on revising the maps for the North Atlantic report, as a small portion of the coast had been accidentally excluded from the original analysis. I basically helped to recreate the relevant layers and add them to the continental United States report. I made layers for Storm Surge and Critical Facilities.
I faced a lot of challenges in this internship simply because GIS is always a learning process, and I often feel as lost as I did when I opened ArcMap for the first time. This internship, however, taught me so much about the program, problem solving, and the importance of community. I learned to employ my own problem-solving techniques (AKA searching 400 variations of “why isn’t my computer working” on Google) before asking for help, but also to be unashamed about asking for help when I need it. I also learned the value of patience, from waiting six hours for a process to run to redoing an entire map because there was a minuscule error in the first step.
My first semester at NEMAC was challenging in the best way. I definitely had some trouble balancing my academic workload with my NEMAC workload at first, but always felt like I could be flexible and was supported by my coworkers. The community was welcoming and kind to me, despite the fact that I was the lost (freshman) puppy amongst a sea of Official Adults™. I also noticed the inclusivity of NEMAC, whereas often women are socially or institutionally excluded from STEM-oriented workplaces. I was a little nervous about working with a GIS group, as my past experiences with GIS companies have been male-dominated and often disadvantageous for young women like me. NEMAC was different—everyone is treated as an equal, with no bias or condescension towards anyone. I was encouraged to ask questions and suggest solutions, as well as shown entirely new sides of the world that I hadn’t seen before.
I am so fortunate to have this opportunity, and to have found it so early in my college career. I wasn’t entirely sure where among the environmental studies my passion lay, but NEMAC helped me to solidify my goals and pursue what I love. I am so grateful to the staff at NEMAC for bringing unquantifiable amounts of intellect, kindness, and laughter to work each day, and I can’t wait for my next semester!
