College students often seek internships during summers that can help them in their careers.

The city of Mexico’s engineering department provides paid internship opportunities that Anna Raines, Caleb King and Molly Dunnavant took part in this summer. 

Students gained experience and knowledge, and King had high praise for the intern program.

“I had a great time working as an intern for the City of Mexico Engineering department,” he said in an email. ”The people there are hard working and funny and never once did I feel like I did not fit in. I highly recommend for any younger person just out of high school or in college looking for professional experience to give it a try. Even if your interests are not in engineering or local government, it can help you get a new perspective on how tasks that require several parties to work together actually get done and the difficulties associated with that.”

Drew Williford, city engineer and public works director, said the department has had the intern programs for a few years.

“At first, up until this year, we’ve tried to have two interns per year, over the summer,” he said. “This year, because we had such a significant amount of projects, we wanted to hire an extra intern, because we just had an enormous amount of work going on.”

He said he has been working at the city for nine years, and the amount of construction happening is more than his eight prior years combined, in a single year. The internship affords students an opportunity to get some real world experience in a number of different ways, both at city hall and in the field.

“So it’s a unique opportunity for them, and we try to get them experience working with wastewater projects, working with street projects, doing some survey work even with our GPS equipment,” Williford said. 

He said the city has students in college as well as just out of high school. The city also has partnered with Missouri Military Academy to allow cadets to gain experience during the school year.

“We’re looking at it as a win-win,” he said. “So it’s a win for the city because we’re able to get an extra person to help us with the work, and boy do we have the work. But then it’s a win for them because they get exposed to these things. I wish I had this when I was their age.”

He said the internship can help the interns understand what kind of work and settings they would like to do. The interns’ primary focus was construction inspection and performing, among other tasks, quantity measurements, such as for public works projects, and the interns also received an introduction to geographic information systems in which they completed a large subdivision project that will allow the city to have all subdivisions in town identified. He said all three interns who worked at the city this summer have a bright future and each is on a good trajectory.

Raines grew up in Paris, Missouri, but moved to Mexico during high school. She attends the University of Missouri, where she is majoring in mechanical engineering, with a career goal to work as an aerospace engineer, specifically designing or improving airplanes, but she said she is also open to exploring other areas within engineering as her career develops.

During her internship this summer, from May to August, she worked on a wide range of projects and responsibilities, including supervising construction sites, documenting hazardous trees, surveying and recording stormwater outfalls and assisting with various office tasks such as managing traffic schedules, drafting grant applications and creating maps for current and future construction projects. She said it was her first internship, and “it set a great standard,” she said in an email.

“There was always something new to learn, and every day brought a different challenge,” she said in an email.

She said some of her most memorable experiences came from the adventures she and others had while locating stormwater outfalls around the city. 

“We often had to hike through woods, slide down steep hills, and collect water samples in hard-to-reach areas (which I thought was fun!),” she said. “Another meaningful highlight was completing a grant application for Mexico’s Sidewalk Improvement Plan toward the end of my internship. The project focuses on connecting key parts of the community, like schools, parks, and local businesses, through safer, more accessible sidewalks.”

The grant was recently approved for nearly $350,000, she said, and she said knowing she played a role in a project that will directly benefit her hometown was “incredibly rewarding.”

“I also gained a deeper appreciation for civil engineering and how critical municipalities are in maintaining a functioning community,” she said. “This experience not only broadened my understanding of engineering but also strengthened my connection to my hometown and showed me how engineering directly impacts people’s daily lives.”

King attends Mizzou and majors in microbiology with chemistry and environmental science minors. This is his last semester before he finishes his undergrad and his next step is graduate school. His ultimate career goal would be doing some form of microbial research in a lab, but he’s unsure as to what he would specifically like to research.

During the internship, King and the other interns were always keeping up with the current construction projects happening in Mexico by meeting with the crews daily and writing reports. 

“We had a few projects where we would catalog certain infrastructure in Mexico,” he said in an email. “One example was inspecting the trees in the right-of-way throughout Mexico. We were doing this to find Ash trees that have been killed by the invasive Emerald Ash Borer and determine their condition so the City of Mexico could decide which ones should be cut down first. This project took us several weeks and by the end we were very familiar with the species of trees in Mexico.”

He added that there were other projects that had interns updating information in the city's database, and they worked on applying for the grant to get sidewalks from Boulevard to Clark.

King said he did this same internship last year in 2024.

“The two biggest things I think I learned from the internship this time around was time management in a group setting and how to clearly, precisely, and professionally convey information to others, whether it was my boss, my co-worker, or a member of the public,” he said.

From the internship, King hoped to gain general work experience in a professional setting. 

“Just to understand what working in a group towards a common goal looks like and how to most efficiently communicate with others,” he said.

Dunnavant, who is from Fulton, graduated from South Callaway High School and is a freshman at Mizzou, majoring in health sciences with an emphasis in pre-pharmacy. Her career goal is to become a pharmacist and work at a hospital.

She said one of the projects she, Anna and Caleb worked on was driving around the city and logging all of the hazardous trees that were in the right-of-way. 

“We had a map, and we would log those trees onto it. They are working on cutting down those trees,” she said in an email. “We also had a few different projects that we worked on in the office.”

She said this is the first internship she has done, and it was “such a great experience,” adding that she enjoyed working at the city of Mexico and having Drew Williford as her boss. 

“I felt like I learned a lot from him,” she said.

One of her most memorable experiences she had during her time in Mexico was getting to watch the Pollock Road Bridge get built, and during that time, she and the other interns helped keep track of the concrete tickets and other information. 

“This was a great learning experience, and it was very interesting to watch how bridges get built,” she said. “Another memorable experience was getting to go to the abandoned hospital and see everything that was in it. We helped collect all of the sharp containers that were in the hospital.”

Dunnavant said during her internship, she learned about the quality of material and that “if it is not up to par, it gets rejected, adding that it is OK to “reject things when the quality is not good. I also learned to ask questions, especially when it is something that you have never done before.”