Washington Post: Summer Internships Spotlight

Joe Heim

Our Outreach and Volunteer coordinator, McKenzie Ingram, was featured in a recent Washington Post article on summer internships in DC. We’ve been fortunate to have McKenzie join us for her second summer working at Anacostia Riverkeeper!

We are proud to offer multiple opportunities for young environmentalists to gain hands on experience working at a local non-profit as they are discovering their passions and place in the world. We have two other interns with us this summer — Claire Barlow as Water Quality Associate and James Mitchell who is working on our boat tours and fishing program.

Interrupted by the pandemic, D.C. summer interns are back in person
Just as cherry blossoms signal the arrival of spring in Washington, the sight of eager hordes of interns headed out to lunch on downtown streets, attending lectures at wonky think tanks or navigating Capitol Hill corridors was always a sure sign that summer had arrived.
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This summer marks a return to almost normal, employers and internship program administrators say. And they’re relieved; to them, it’s hard to replace the value of an in-person experience for students trying to find a career path or make the contacts essential to landing jobs.
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McKenzie Ingram is another intern whose job isn’t typical D.C. fare. A graduate student in environmental science at American University, Ingram, 20, is spending her second summer as an intern at Anacostia Riverkeeper, where her duties have included everything from tracking bacteria pollution in the river to organizing volunteer clean ups, leading boat tours and hosting the organization’s Friday Night Fishing events. The experience, she said, has been educational professionally and transformative personally.

“Before I started this internship, I was living in D.C., but I didn’t feel like I was really in a community in D.C.,” Ingram said. “These cleanups took me all over every ward, every district, and up and down the river from Maryland to D.C. And once I started getting in these outreach programs and actually talking to a lot of the communities in D.C., I really felt like I was connected to D.C. itself.”