|
July/August 2003
 Intern Margaret Lee checks the condition of Muni bus stops.
(Photo: Kit Morris)
|
High School Interns Get Taste of Transportation
Margaret Lee gets to spend her summer outdoors, but instead of hiking nature trails as a
park ranger, chaperoning kids as a summer camp counselor or patrolling the water as a
lifeguard, she traverses the urban landscape, keeping a tight schedule as she maneuvers her
way around San Francisco to update records on the Muni system’s infrastructure.
The 18-year-old, who just graduated from San Francisco’s George Washington High
School and will be attending the University of California (UC) at Santa Cruz in the fall,
is one of 47 students currently participating in MTC’s high school internship
program. Over 200 applications — the most the program has seen thus far — were
received this year, making for stiff competition among the many qualified and motivated
students hoping to spend up to eight weeks this summer working with public transit and
planning agencies throughout the Bay Area. The interns work directly for these agencies,
but MTC provides the funding for their salaries.
Some interns spend their days in the field, performing tasks like timing transit routes and
making sure traffic signals work. Lee, for example, visits about 50 to 60 bus stops in San
Francisco each day, monitoring their accessibility to disabled riders, documenting bus
shelter conditions, and making sure physical features such as curb cuts, benches and trash
receptacles comply with agency standards. Muni will use this information to make necessary
repairs or improvements. “I know from personal experience what it’s like to
wait for a bus at a stop with no seats or a broken bench,” Lee said. “I’m
glad to be doing something that will directly help people.”
Other interns, like 17-year-old Samuel Libeu — a recent graduate from Campolindo High
School in Moraga — work primarily in offices doing data entry, writing project
reports, updating mapping systems and the like. Yet Libeu’s supervisors at the
Central Contra Costa Transit Authority make a point to intersperse his administrative
duties with fieldwork such as manning cash registers at ticket vending locations, riding
buses to determine how to make routes more efficient and shadowing drivers to ensure
employee courtesy.
“They do make an effort to vary the type of work that I do, which is good,”
said Libeu, who is headed for UC Berkeley.
Diversity abounds not only in the interns’ responsibilities, but al-so in the
geographic scope of the program: This is the first time in the program’s four-year
history that it has included students and job positions in all nine of the counties MTC
serves. Originally conceived by MTC’s Minority Citizens Advisory Committee, the
program aims to provide college-bound youths — particularly minority youths —
with hands-on experience to foster their interests in transportation
as a possible career path.
“The program exposes young people to many different aspects of transportation,”
said Nick Osano, assistant high school internship coordinator at MTC and himself a
college-level intern. “It gives them a glimpse into these kinds of careers as well as
a sense of their potential and the skills and knowledge they need to develop.”
At the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, 16-year old Brian Harmer is
spending his summer cataloging bus stop conditions before entering his junior year at
Kentfield’s Marin Catholic High School. “It’s commendable to see
individuals of his age getting a good start this early in life,” said Harmer’s
supervisor, Principal Planner Maurice Palumbo. “Either the realities of this
experience will reinforce his notion of wanting to go into transportation, or he’ll
do a 180 degree turnaround because of it.”
— Deanna Yick
MTC launched this year’s high school internship program
with an orientation at its offices at the MetroCenter in Oakland.
(Photo: Peter Beeler)
Contents
|
