I was tasked with being the Internship Assistant for the TRIO Upward Bound Summer Program 2025 at Boise State University, which is a 5-week educational experience for TRIO students from Meridian H.S., Nampa H.S., Caldwell H.S. and Owyhee H.S. (the one at the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, not the one in Meridian). My initial goals were to find community partners that would host TRIO summer interns, which I started working on in May. I communicated with businesses, nonprofits, and individuals – many of whom I had first connected with last summer through my previous i-STEM Action Center externship last year. I coordinated efforts to formally engage host sites with the BSU TRIO Upward Bound office to make the internships official.

My next – and primary – task was to facilitate and support the TRIO internships. This included physically transporting students between BSU and their internship sites, periodically conducting internship site visits, and acting as a liaison between the interns and their host site supervisors throughout the 5-week program. I also met with site supervisors to obtain formal feedback about their experience with the TRIO interns and the internship program. I compiled that feedback with information about the interns’ experiences into reports for the TRIO Upward Bound program’s use.

The interns were placed at all kinds of locations ranging from The Idaho Foodbank, Agency for New Americans, TAIT Engineering, LEAP Housing, and several BSU Departments, including the Center for Orthopaedic and Biomechanics Research (COBR). The interns had incredible opportunities to engage in STEM work, including helping conduct live human experiments in a partnership between COBR and the BSU Kinesiology lab, creating 3D renderings of office buildings using the Revit CAD program at TAIT, and conducting STEM lessons and activities for the public at the Discovery Center of Idaho. The TRIO interns were all incredible! They worked hard and made the most of the great opportunities they were given.
I helped the TRIO interns navigate some of the challenges and difficulties they faced working in the adult business world in Boise. I also helped obtain feedback from the interns and the internship host sites to help the program improve some of its processes for next year, including better communication about scheduling and timing of the internships.

I learned a lot about what kinds of opportunities are available for students to engage during high school, while they’re in college, and also career opportunities that I was not fully aware of before. My externship experience this summer has reinforced my belief that my primary job as an educator is to inform and empower students to explore their world, find opportunities that interest them and stretch themselves to achieve more than what they might have thought was possible. I learned a lot from the students about resilience, the power of a positive attitude and keeping a sense of humor through it all.

Grade Level and Subject Taught: Grades 11th-12th, Exploratory Internships