An internship on watershed management

Greetings to all the people of the CNMI. My name is Georgia Ann Sanchez Cabrera and I am the proud daughter of Veronica Sanchez Cabrera and George Camacho Cabrera. I am currently working as an intern at Division of Environmental Quality. The focus of my internship is Watershed Management and my mentors are Kathleen Herrmann, Reina Camacho and Fran Castro. I am really glad I was selected as one of 10 students for this summer’s internship. I can honestly say that I am having a great time working at the division.

One of the main goals of my internship is to develop an Island Stewardship Booklet for Laulau Bay Homeowners. In this project I am assigned to make a booklet based upon a Hawaii Island Stewardship Guide and incorporate the results from the Lau Lau Bay “Know your Watershed” survey. I have been learning to use a new program, Adobe Photoshop, which makes it a bit easier for me to publish a booklet because you can select the size of how small or big you want the booklet to be. So far, all I have to do now is look over it once again before I do anything else on it, and before I turn it into my mentor to take a look at it. The booklet will be distributed to the people living in the Laulau Bay Watershed when completed.

I’ve been assigned a variety of different projects for this summer’s internship and so far everything is going great. The first project is to become familiar with basic principles of watershed planning and take an online quiz to see how well I’ve done and what I’ve learned so far. The website was http://www.cwp.org/whats_a_watershed.htm. Check out the quiz and see how well you do!

The second project assigned to me was to complete the USEPA Watershed Academy web training, which also consists of six Modules: Introductory/Overview, Watershed Ecology, Watershed Change, Analysis and Planning, Management Practices, and Community/Social/Water Law. Each module required study and reading and finally a quiz, testing me to see what I have learned so far. I was able to complete these requirements without a problem.

My third project was to analyze the results from the Laulau Bay Survey called, “Know Your Watershed”. For this project I was able to put all the results into the Microsoft Excel for a better understanding. Some interesting data includes:

For instance, 33 percent understand the term Watershed and DEQ is working to increase it to a 100 percent.

Working as an intern has been really interesting. Part of our internship was to participate in some group activities, one of which is the Reef Flat Monitoring. I was able to attend one of the Reef Flat Monitoring events at Bird Island. Depending on the size of the group, they break everyone into four different groups. Each monitoring volunteer was given the chance to go underwater to see what type of corals, sea grass and other creatures live in the ocean.

The other group activity is the Library Story Hour. It’s an activity where each intern visits the library and reads a storybook to children. We read books focused on the environment or resource conservation as we are trying to promote these concepts. When I did story hour, I got the opportunity to read the book, Hooray Earth Day, and meet the little kids who take their time to go to the library to read books and study. Story hour gave me the opportunity to expose myself to our very important role at DEQ, which is public outreach/community engagement.

We also participate in a weekly scientific article discussion where we are given an article to read and summarize. The interns then discuss the article as a group with one of the agency biologists.

Lastly we were all assigned to do an internship report. By the end of the internship, we are required to write a report about out internship and create a PowerPoint presentation, which will be presented to the directors and mentors.

As an intern, I am pleased to say that it has been an honor working with Division of Environmental Quality and having to stop will make me sad. However, thanks to working here at DEQ, it helped me be a part of the Micronesia Challenge.

I am currently a student at Northern Marianas College majoring in Liberal Arts. With my experience as an intern, I am more confident and hope to obtain a degree in Environmental Science or Natural Resource Management. As there are so many things that I have learned, I want to continue learning more about our environment and share my knowledge and experiences with others as the years go by and with the young generation.

Working at DEQ has been really amazing! [B][I](Georgia Ann Sanchez Cabrera)[/I][/B]