Intern Profile: Victoria Peguri
Photo courtesy of Victoria Peguri.
This semester, Victoria Peguri worked as an intern for the Burlington Walk Bike Council. The Walk Bike Council is a citizen group dedicated to improving Burlington infrastructure for walking and biking. They are collaborating with Local Motion, a non-profit advocacy group, to evaluate Burlington’s progress on the official city plan for walk/bike projects. She has been interpreting data from progress over the last five years to create a Five-Year Progress Report. This work “entails going through a lot of data, putting it into graphs, and trying to understand what it means,” said Victoria in our conversation on Saturday morning. This data includes comparing the number of mileage of bike lanes that have been built in Burlington to the number that the Council hoped to achieve in the last five years. They also have investigated sidewalk mileage, but there were not many built.
Victoria enjoys this internship because it allows her to “see the nitty gritty of the policy.” She is a junior Environmental Science major in the Rubenstein School of the Environment. Her concentration is in ecological design, which relates to her internship through the themes of sustainable built infrastructure and planning for walk/bike communities.
She spends at least 5 hours a week on the internship but wants to stress to future interns that it is important to make a semester-long schedule for yourself. She said that the “beginning of the semester, literally the first three months, were chaos.” She is a bit of a procrastinator, but always gets the work done before her weekly meeting with her supervisor.
Initially, she was planning to do an internship in wastewater management, which would have related more to the science aspects of her classwork. She was a bit nervous to continue with the program when it started to go in a different direction towards the progress report, but “the experience has turned out to be really worthwhile.” She is most happy with the hands-on experiences she has gained from the internship. She also enjoyed the class on urban planning because of the books we read, primarily Jeff Speck’s walkable city.
Victoria gained professional communication skills. She has gotten comfortable with being in interviews. She also presented in front of members of the Burlington Walk/Bike Council. At first, she was nervous about the presentation, but it went very smoothly because she was fully prepared.
“Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to do 110% for this internship. The supervisors understand that you’re in school, so do what is sustainable for you and it’ll work out,” Victoria said when asked if she had advice for future interns.
