I will be interning with the mayor of Durango, Christina Rinderle. As an intern, I will be accompanying Christina to meetings and events, assisting where needed, and learning about what she does.
Project Proposal:
For my LINK internship, I will be interning with the mayor
of Durango, Christina Rinderle. In
addition to her duties as mayor, she also is a realtor for the Wells Group, but
I will be interning primarily for the mayor side of things. As the mayor, she
is on city council, so one of her duties is to attend all city council meetings
and the meetings of other city boards.
In addition, she plays a lot of other roles in the city and county
affairs. She will have much to offer me,
including her people skills, organization skills, coordination skills, and her
ability to deal with many things at once efficiently. I will be able to offer some beneficial qualities
for her as well, including my organizational approach, unique perspective, enthusiasm,
and efficiency.
I will be able to bring these skills to my project, helping
to coordinate the VIP tent at the USA Pro Cycling Challenge, which will be held
in Durango this summer. The time of my
internship is the same time that all of the things associated with the even
need to come together, so it works perfectly.
I will be able to bring some event planning expertise to this project –
I have planned the First Annual Youth Expo through the Mayor’s Youth Advisory
Commission, and I have helped to plan the school dance through the Student
Advisory Council. It is especially
pertinent to my internship with the mayor, because one of the main duties of
the mayor is coordinating many different things. My work with the USA Pro Cycling Challenge
will help out my mentor quite a bit.
Currently, Christina is on the board for the VIP tent, so I will be assisting
with this role to lighten her load, and I will contribute to the effieciency
and the completion of the tent.
All the coordination that will be required for my project
reflects my long-term career goals.
Currently, I am thinking that I want to be a foreign relations or global
studies major in a good college. This
would eventually lead to a job in some kind of field relating to travel, diplomacy,
or world relations, which would require many of the skills needed for my
project and internship. This was how I
came up with the idea to intern with Mayor Rinderle. At first, I wanted to go out of town for my
internship, but soon realized that was not feasible for me. So instead, I decided to look inside Durango
for something big, relating to my interests.
This led me to Christina, who I had been working with a little bit
through the Mayor’s Youth Advisory Commission, and whose job intrigued me. I approached her about it, and she was very
enthusiastic, and so we decided that it would work.
However, before we came up with the idea for this project, I
was going to be a part of the ‘Durango Connected’ project, originally intended
to be a celebration of the completion of the river trail this spring. But early on in the brainstorming process,
the mayor and I had a misunderstanding about the role that I was going to play
in the project. I thought that I was
going to be the one organizing the event, but she was under the impression that
I would be playing her role in the event – handling the city side of things and
coordinating between the city and the event planners. Then, the timeline for the project changed so
that the three weeks that I had for my internship no longer overlapped with the
crucial planning time of the event.
Because of this, about a week ago Christina and I met after a Mayor’s
Youth Advisory Commission meeting and decided that the river trail project
would no longer apply to me. So we came
up with the new idea for the VIP tent at the Pro Cycling Challenge. I have not really done that much planning
since then because of the short notice, in addition to the fact that I have
been out of town. Therefore, I plan to
meet with Christina next week and work out more details, and this weekend I
also plan on going over some of the details of the Challenge.
The place that I will be working on a day to day basis will
most likely be Mayor Rinderle’s office downtown. This is where we will meet and where I will
do much of my project, but I will also be in many other places throughout
Durango – at meetings, events, and businesses.
This will make my internship even more academically, socially, and
environmentally rich, providing me with many other opportunities outside of
just the mayor’s office. I will be able
to meet all of the other people involved in not only my project, but also all
the other aspects of the city’s inner workings, and learn from them. I look forward to all the different parts of
my internship, and I hope that I will learn a lot.
