Environmental Sustainability Internship High School Course

Find a high school or college professor willing to develop a new internship course. This could include something like a capstone course, independent project, co-op program, etc.

Find volunteers to serve as mentors (ideally, one mentor per student). Ask municipal staff (Planning Department, Sustainability Department, Public Works, Conservation Commission), private industry, nonprofits, etc. I reach out to potential mentors over the summer. Each mentor writes a summary of their project.

When school begins, host a matching event. What I like to do is speed interviews. Each student can sign up for 4 mentors that they want to talk with. I invite all the mentors to come to my class on the designated time and day. I create a schedule indicating which student is talking to which mentor in each of 4 time slots. We spread out between my classroom and desks in the hallway, although we have also used Zoom. Then each mentor/student pair gets 5 minutes to talk and then all of the students switch to their next mentor interview. After the interviews I gather a list from each mentor and from each student on their top choices. Then I match the mentors to the students. This has generally always worked out where each student gets their number 1 or 2 choice and each mentor does as well.

Ask mentors to meet with their intern once a week following all of the appropriate meeting protocols. Many mentors meet their students at the town library or may go out for pizza. Once they get to know each other they may meet via Zoom or a phone call.

Let the mentors be in charge of the projects! They set the goals and schedule and also evaluate the student’s work. I created a mentor evaluation form that mentors fill out with their intern each month to talk through how well the student is doing in the three areas: leadership, project management and environmental learning.

Allow students to use their class time in a variety of ways. They may meet with mentors or work on drafting a flyer or practicing a presentation. Also let students know that there will be significant time needed to work on their project outside the classroom. For instance, a student who was learning about electric school buses visited the bus depot. Many students have attended evening town board meetings. We have had students present at our town meeting (they needed to be 18). We have had students run a sustainability fair. We have had students moderate webinars. All of these have been outside class time.

At the end of the school year, have each student create a final presentation trifold in addition to whatever their mentor may have required. Invite all of the mentors, parents and town staff to come to the final poster session and talk with all of the students.