What Gary Larson and The Far Side were for many scientists, Scott Adams and Dilbert have become for many others: a humorous, if twisted, perception of their working world and a great source of refrigerator and office art. In Dilbert's world, there are two philosophies for managing interns: leave them in a room and tell them to look busy - leading newly "internized" Ratbert to wonder "what did interns do before they invented the computer?" - or load the unsuspecting intern up with the worst tasks in the office and then blame them for all failures when management comes around. Fortunately, the realities of internships and fellowships in the area of coastal resources policy and management are significantly more positive than those Dilbertian philosophies. In a good internship, whether volunteer, for class credit, or paid, both intern and manager benefit greatly.

An excellent example of a mutually beneficial relationship between student interns and a community is the Branford River Project in Branford, Conn. The local land trust and Rotary Club decided to focus efforts to raise community environmental awareness on the Branford River watershed, hoping to protect the shellfishing and recreational resources at the mouth of the river. Unfortunately, the group had little data on the status of the river and even less money for hiring a consultant. They were able to hook up with a watershed management course being offered at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and six students took on the Branford River as a coordinated class project. Maria Storm, the Branford River project coordinator, couldn't have been happier with the results.

"The information the students gathered for us was much more than we ever could have collected on our own. We feel that the project is ready to take action steps that would have taken years to get to if we hadn't had student interns' help," Storm said.

Paul Barten, Yale University associate professor of forestry and frequent intern supervisor, says, "Graduate students quickly realize they have a great deal to offer, in the form of scientific and technical expertise, but also a great deal to learn - about interacting with clients, translating jargon and labyrinth logic into English, and finally, making defensible management recommendations based on incomplete data and information. This replicates what they will face as practicing professionals immediately after graduation. It is their 'solo test flight' as environmental scientists and managers."

Interns need not be at the graduate school or post-graduate level. In many situations, high school or undergraduate college students are looking for internship opportunities either for class credit or to get a better idea of "what they want to be when they grow up." In New York, St. John's University senior and environmental studies major Laura D'Angelo needed a project to complete her degree and found one as an intern in the Environmental Protection Agency Long Island Sound Office (LISO). The LISO had conducted a survey to identify potential habitat restoration sites around the Sound. Hundreds of survey forms were returned and needed to be compiled in a usable format, but the LISO didn't have the staff to complete the project. D'Angelo spent two days a week, supervised by Kimberly Zimmer, New York Sea Grant Extension program assistant, identifying all the proposed sites and transferring them onto U.S. Geological Survey topographic quad maps.

In addition, she developed an identification system so that all sites and associated data can be placed in a database for future use. According to Carolyn Hughes, LISO executive director, "completing the project wouldn't have been possible without Laura's effort." Zimmer agrees. "Laura really learned a lot about maps during this project, as well as about coastal habitat areas and their problems. She said the project really helped make her studies 'real world' and relevant. It was also the first time she had to call up people at the state and federal level to learn how they organized and identified similar data."

Most Sea Grant programs have internships, ranging from the informal "opportunistic endeavors" to more formally structured programs. In Connecticut, one Sea Grant advisory/outreach activity is the Yale Sea Grant Internship Program, administered through the Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems (CCWS) within the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (YFES). Emly McDiarmid, CCWS program director says, "The center is committed to direct participation in watershed programs, exchanges within the community, and interdisciplinary as well as interinstitutional dialogue. The Sea Grant internship program furthers this commitment by providing a stable, relatively long-term (two years at a time) base of support, assuring the availability of human resources to meet the environmental needs of the community." The program funds graduate students to work on community-based projects. One requirement for obtaining a Yale Sea Grant internship is that, while an individual project may be very site-specific, the resulting materials or analysis should be applicable to other coastal areas of Connecticut or within the Northeast.

Before coming to YFES, Duncan Schmitt was a litigator in Bridgeport, dealing with contract disputes and worker's compensation claims. Schmitt found that working in a high-rise and settling these sorts of disputes was less than satisfying when every day during his commute he could see how "the world that people were living in needed help." Consequently, Schmitt came to Yale interested in urban forestry. He found out about urban watershed management as an aspect of nonpoint source pollution control during a class project, and became a Sea Grant intern the following semester. Schmitt found that his internship project moved him light years beyond the initial interest in watershed management created by his classwork.

Originally an effort to develop a watershed-wide database of stakeholders and community-level organizations to support watershed restoration efforts, his project ended up focusing on the impacts of one proposed commercial development in a critical section of the riparian corridor. As he put it, "Class projects have to be pretty cut and dried to fit the time available and the curriculum. My Sea Grant internship blossomed out for me in ways a class project never could. By focusing on what was happening with that one development proposal, I saw how a real gap exists between federal guidelines for nonpoint source pollution control and local implementation efforts."

Schmitt says his experience as a Sea Grant intern has given him a new approach. "Now I like to research a land use issue on three or four different levels: establish the actual physical resource, identify private land use priorities, determine the applicable local and state control mechanisms, and review all federal guidance on the issues involved." Schmitt is now applying to local foundations for grants supporting further work with the CCWS and the Quinnipiac River Watershed Association to combine community development with watershed management efforts. "The things I learned to do as a lawyer - drafting letters, negotiating agreements, all that sort of stuff - is a lot more fun when it's doing something good for both the community and the environment."

Chris Page came to the YFES program after four years as an environmental educator, journalist, and jack of all trades with the National Public Radio program, Living on Earth. Page has created Geographic Information System (GIS) database layers for the West River watershed from social and economic data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. By combining this information with other data layers in the system, such as critical natural resources, water quality, and land use patterns, she hopes to be able to create a method of querying the database to identify "issue hot spots." With a background in both environmental and religious studies, Page originally came to Yale because of the school's commitment to interdisciplinary problem solving. "Other schools just wanted to put me in a [single-discipline] box and that wasn't comfortable." She feels the Sea Grant internship shows a commitment to encourage creative thinking in interdisciplinary efforts.

"The idea of applying GIS to inventorying social indicators within a watershed is a little off the wall for a lot of funding organizations that should be sympathetic to the idea because it fits right in with their agenda," Page commented. "They just can't seem to understand why on earth people are important in watershed management. Go figure."

Coming from a career in highway planning, David Casagrande felt he had been "seeing just one end of a lot of environmental issues and wanted to be able to look deeper into the issues." For his Sea Grant internship, Casagrande conducted surveys in several neighborhoods of the West River watershed to document the attitudes and perceptions of watershed residents towards the river. Survey results have caused New Haven planners to place greater consideration on passive park uses, such as wildlife habitat and aesthetics of the river. The results will also be published in the January 1997 Coastal Management Journal, giving policy makers around the country an understanding of the underlying reasons for urban watershed values and recreation patterns.

Originally interested in tropical forest areas, Casagrande's Sea Grant internship gave him the opportunity to consider urban watersheds in detail. He found the issues to be of great interest. The financial support of the internship was critical to this shift. "There's so much monetary pressure in graduate school that people have to be flexible and go where there is support, and that has long-term impacts on their career paths. I think I'm going to stay in the area of urban watershed management for some time now because of my internship experience. Of course, if someone had been willing to give me money to study parrot populations in Paraguay, I'd probably be doing something completely different right now."

At the national level, the granddaddy of all coastal management internship/fellowship programs is the National Sea Grant Federal Fellows Program, more commonly known as the Dean John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowships. Established in 1979 to provide graduate students interested in coastal resources with experience in the national policy-making process, the program matches candidates with host programs in the executive or legislative branches of the federal government or with other institutions in the Washington, D.C., area. With the average annual number of fellowships hovering around 25, literally hundreds of interested students have been able to get an insider's view of the national policy-making process. As Edward Monahan, Connecticut Sea Grant director, points out, "The Knauss fellowships are really a tremendous opportunity for those selected. I try to encourage applicants who are in the final stages of their degree work, because I've found the experience to be so positive that the majority of fellows from Connecticut sooner rather than later decide to remain in Washington."

The newest kid on the national internship/fellowship block is the NOAA Coastal Services Center Coastal Management Fellowship Program, established in early 1996. Established "to provide professional on-the-job education and training opportunity for postgraduate students in coastal resource and policy, while providing specific technical assistance for state coastal resource management programs," the program will match six highly qualified postgraduates, who must be sponsored by their state Sea Grant director, with state coastal zone management program hosts. The Coastal Services Center is acting as an updated version of the old-fashioned matchmaker in this program. Through the preliminary selection process, as much as possible is learned about the wants, needs, and abilities of both host programs and candidate fellows. Then the two sides are introduced, as it were, to see if there really is a good fit. Rather than ending up with the perfect spouse, the results of this program will be a professional relationship that benefits both parties.

If everything works out, and good matches are made, the Northeast may have two Coastal Management Fellows at work on local and regional issues. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection Office of Long Island Sound Programs (OLISP) proposes to both strengthen the management of wetlands restoration within Connecticut and to share the state's expertise and success stories with the general public and other coastal management agencies via the World Wide Web. Ron Rozsa, OLISP coastal ecologist, describes the project goals: "We need to develop a formal wetland restoration database to track projects. We also need better technology transfer to other states and state managers on what we do in Connecticut in terms of tidal wetlands restoration and how we do it. Other states are 20 years behind and are always asking for information." A World Wide Web site will help make the public more aware of Connecticut's wetlands restoration program, he said.

The Gulf of Maine may also benefit from a coastal fellow. The coastal programs of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine submitted a joint proposal to host a Coastal Management Fellow to survey and evaluate the coastal habitat restoration approaches currently being used within the region. The project was designed to raise awareness of the value of, and need for, habitat restoration and the breadth of approaches available. Projects, personnel, and expertise from both the United States and Canada will be incorporated into the project, which may provide insight into how limited restoration funds can be best utilized.

In the end, an internship or fellowship experience and the resulting plugging of another gap in the coastal management dam will only be as good as the partners make it. A balance must be struck to ensure that projects are focused enough to be useful to managers, yet broad enough to provide the critical, real-world experience the interns or fellows need. While Rozsa agrees with many other coastal managers that using interns and fellows is a great way to get projects done that would otherwise never be completed, he is more excited by the opportunity to help graduates get further field experience. "Anything that will help the future managers of our coastal resources get more hands-on experience can only be a good thing."

Heather M. Crawford is Coastal Resources Educator for the Connecticut Sea Grant Marine Advisory Program.

Return to
Nor'easter
Table of Contents