Urban Planning Internships

Alley Lyles is interning for Mayor Bloomberg's Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne at NYC Digital. Alley is interested in the intersection of social media and city-level politics. As part of her duties, she consults with city agencies on improving social media strategies, coordinates social media managers at City agencies and provides support to the NYC Digital web marketing team in all aspects of the NYC.gov website re-vamp slated for November 2012. Additionally, she works alongside city partners which include Soundcloud, Spotify and Foursquare along others. Alley strongly believes social media and planning will be the basis of her thesis, and more importantly, her ultimate career path.

Caroline is interning with the Architecture & Construction Unit at the United Nations Headquarters. Though she has no architecture background, her internship required that she develop AutoCAD dexterity and learn the fundamentals of electrical engineering— useful skills for future endeavors in international development work. This position allows her access to all Departments of the UN Headquarters and to people from all over the world who are doing work ranging from Peacekeeping Missions to Human Resource Management.

Jaeyoung wrote to tell us that this summer she is interning at one of the fourteen Millennium Villages Project (MVP) in the Bonsaaso cluster in Ghana. The mission of MVP is to work with villages to develop and implement plans for achieving the Millennium Development Goals by focusing on capacity building and community empowerment through the improvement of water and sanitation access, other essential infrastructure, education, agriculture production, basic healthcare, and environmental sustainability. The fourteen clusters of villages are located in ten sub-Saharan African countries where an interdisciplinary team from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, UNDP, Millennium Promise, and local governments are conducting research on this integrated approach to development thats led and implemented by the local communities.

She has been responsible for conducting an initial assessment of issues surrounding water access and water quality in the Bonsaaso cluster as well as proposing strategies and recommendations for expansion of water projects in the next five years as the project enters its second phase.

"What I've been primarily doing is organizing a survey project of park users staffed by 9 undergraduate students from St Francis College in Brooklyn. I also do website work, writing, research, and conduct tours of the park."

"This summer I've been working for the Division of Energy Management at NYC DCAS. DEM is responsible for coordinating NYC's municipal energy conservation and long-term greenhouse gas emissions reduction efforts under PlaNYC. It's been really great so far as they've actually given me a bit of responsibility, and I also get to interact with many other City agencies."

In these photos, you can see Peter participating in the NYC Cool Roof project and posing at a City-wide intern barbecue at Gracie Mansion with classmate Christina Ghan (she is interning at the NYC Department of Design and Construction).