Paige Meyer recently completed an internship with the Upper MN Valley Regional Development Commission. This is what they had to say about the experience.
Last year I learned how to professionally communicate with town officials as well as create professional emails and work with the LOIS website. This year I took it a step further when I had to coordinate with chambers about meeting times, took a work trip, and created a housing development pdf. The reason for meeting with the chambers of towns such as Mankato and New Ulm stemmed from updating the photos for the Scenic Minnesota River Valley Byway website. From this experience I learned how to use a camera, edit photos, and plan a trip spanning multiple destinations and days. It was a little bit of a challenge coordinating with the Chambers and sites, but I was eventually able to come up with an efficient plan. I think that the skills I learned with a camera, Photoshop and Lightroom will be helpful in the future if I am to work on a similar project.
Apart from the Byway project I was also involved in a new project the RDC started working on. The goal of the Housing Development Inventory project was to come up with a list of city-owned lots available in each community and advertise them in a professional manner to potential developers.
The challenge of this project is that it had never really been done before. Through many emails and conversations, I was able to put together a master list of all the available lots in our region. I then condensed information from our Prairie Waters website for each community to make a community profile for each town. All of this was then aesthetically organized into a pdf that can be shared. This project taught me patience and persistence along with the practical skills of organization and Adobe InDesign. After hearing back from communities, I would follow up to inquire about any Developable Properties. This project was the same as last year. I would ask them if the list of available properties I had was up to date, then would adjust as needed. The goal of this was to create an up-to-date inventory of possible locations for businesses to locate. However, it was a little different this year. LOIS, the program I used to input all the new properties, updated itself so that information from real estate websites would automatically transfer over. This made my job easier so that I could focus on the other projects. In addition to the Developable Properties project was a new related project-we decided to create a Developable Properties Spotlight and advertise available properties from different communities each week. From this I was able to learn how to create an ad as well as how to approach city officials about those properties.
Overall, I am very grateful for this internship and all the things I was able to learn. There are a lot of other things I was able to learn through this internship that I can’t, as of now, think of.I know that this experience will help me to be better prepared for my future. Whether that maybe this coming year at college, or my professional career. My hope is that I will be able to use all that I know to help and better serve others. All I know is that this internship at the UMVRDC is a great start.