Outside Interns

Dan Warren crawled on his hands and knees through two-foot-high greenery growing alongside Cottonwood Creek in the Bodie Hills, looking for a good place to net aquatic insects.

It’s not the sort of activity most college students would choose for their summer vacation. But Warren, an undergraduate at UC Irvine, is paying for the privilege of being in the remote, sagebrush-blanketed hills north of Mono Lake, helping the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study the stream’s health.

He is one of 14 students taking part in a summer internship program run through the University of California’s White Mountain Research Station, located several miles outside this Eastern Sierra town. The 3-year-old program attracts participants from colleges and universities throughout the country eager to rough it while carrying out environmental and archeological projects.

Summer internships often get a bad rap. Many are viewed as grunt work or make-work, as opportunities for college students to learn a little about the world, and themselves, and perhaps decide whether they want to make a certain field their career. But whether the internship is in a big company or a law firm, the students often are considered little more than gofers, hardly entrusted with important chores.

Not here.

The interns are doing work needed by the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the California Department of Fish and Game and other agencies. Many of the projects involve studies the agencies would like to do themselves but cannot because of budget and staff cuts.

Teams of students are surveying rare plants and bighorn sheep, monitoring mountain amphibians and examining prehistoric cultural sites. They are measuring the depths and bottom contours of Sierra lakes and netting fish to record their lengths and weights.

“This is not a game,” said Susan Szewczak of the UC research station, who devised and now oversees the program. “They can’t do crummy work and go away. If they don’t produce good work, the agencies would simply no longer work with us. . . . They are active participants in what goes on.”

Officials who handle internships at other schools see the Sierra program as one worth emulating--and not merely because of the responsibility given to the students.

“I like the idea of the team effort,” said Janet Michalski, director of the Center for Internships at the University of Colorado’s Denver campus. “Too often, the student is the intern at an agency--they’re the only one and they’re quite isolated. But working in a team situation is a skill that’s badly needed in the workplace, and traditional academic education doesn’t give the student much opportunity to work in a team. . . . It sounds cutting-edge.”

For all its wilderness allure, the program has a rather bureaucratic name: Interagency Resource Teams. Run in part with grants from the Berger Foundation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, it weighs applicants by grades, recommendations and responses to an essay question to find “students who appear to be highly motivated and self-starting,” Szewczak said.

This summer’s group includes a Cornell University graduate who as a Fulbright scholar recently worked on a global warming project in Italy, a Harvard junior-to-be and five students from UC campuses. Half of the group members are biology majors, but one is a philosophy student and another studies “cultural geography.”

Some are enrolled for college credit and pay $560 in tuition for a four-week program. Others, here mostly for the experience and to make contacts, pay only room and board.

After initial orientation and instruction from agency personnel, scientists and community members, the students break into teams of two to five and head for the Sierra back country or other locations. Once in the field, they work largely on their own, though with field supervisors--students who have gone through the program in previous summers.

“It’s a dream job,” said Noah Hamm, an undergraduate at Northland College in Wisconsin who is working as a field supervisor. “I get to be in the mountains, study wildlife and help other people to learn about it, and that’s my job. It’s all I could ask for.”

Officials of some of the agencies here initially were wary of the program because they tried using students before and found it took more time to train them than the results warranted.

“When we first talked about this, I was a little bit hesitant,” said Steve Parmenter, a California Fish and Game fisheries biologist. “I’ve had lots of dealings with volunteers and usually it’s a mixed bag. . . . But I also had some major work I was interested in doing about the ecology of brook trout in high mountain lakes, and no way that I could ever see funding it. Through this program, I was able to fund a crew of people to do the data collection at just a fraction of what it would have cost me . . . about 40 cents on the dollar.

“They really performed well,” he said of the students. “They’re very responsible, insightful and energetic.”

Anne Halford, a U.S. Bureau of Land Management botanist, noted that the summer’s “extra staff” benefits as well. The students come away with “an idea of how biologists work,” she said, “and an understanding of how the ecosystem in the Eastern Sierra functions biologically.”

Szewczak developed the internships when she was a dean at Deep Springs College, a tiny experimental school in the California desert that focuses on building character. This is the first year the program has been affiliated with the University of California, however, and she envisions expansion, perhaps to have students work on economic or social projects.

The students are housed in dorms at the White Mountain station. But their forays into the field are what produce juicy war stories to take back to campus.

Last summer, Hamm and three others hiked to do trout research above the tree line only to hastily return to the research station without collecting much data. Their excuse? A twist on “the dog ate my homework.”

“I woke up in the middle of the night and looked up, and I couldn’t see the stars,” Hamm recalled. “I realized there was a great big bear standing right above me. In one night it ate about 20 meals worth of food. So the next day we had no food and we had to pack out.”