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Making the Most of Summer

UNC Asheville Students’ Internships and Service Projects Forge Connections

By UNC Asheville

August 31^st, 2021

A UNC Asheville education doesn’t begin or end in the classroom, or even with the end of the semester. For some students, summer means launching their college careers, or digging deeper into real-world research. For others, this summer was about finding new experiences, forging connections, and discovering meaningful ways to engage with the community. Learn about their stories below:

Lizbeth Rivas

Junior management major, sociology minor

Compañeros Inmigrantes de las Montañas en Acción (CIMA)

Lizbeth Rivas has been involved in community engagement since she began working at Urban Promise, a youth leadership organization, at the age of 15, and she hasn’t slowed down since coming to UNC Asheville. This summerRivas interned at Compañeros Inmigrantes de las Montañas en Acción (CIMA), an immigrants rights organization, as an SECU Public Fellow, a program designed to connect interested, talented undergraduate students with local leadership in order to obtain meaningful on-the-job experience, while providing a unique learning opportunity to allow students to give back to their community.

“My main responsibility this summer was doing community outreach,” Rivas said. “My main project was to create a document that contained questions and responses that were easily accessible and readable for volunteers to use for the CIMA texting service hotline.”

The CIMA hotline allows community members constant access to CIMA resources, including directions to a food pantry, reports of police checkpoints or ICE raids, and ways to volunteer.

“I went through over probably 5,000 text messages, and I analyzed some of the common questions and some of the common themes that I saw within what was going on and what was being sent to the hotline, and some of the responses, and what questions got more engagement,” Rivas explained. She then created an accessible handbook for volunteers who staff the hotline.

For Rivas, the internship was a chance to learn more about how nonprofit organizations work, to meet and network with people in her future field, and to begin to forge connections with the Hispanic community in Asheville.

“This summer I’ve really been able to explore that community, and I was welcomed with open arms, which was amazing,” Rivas said.

“Many are really excited to be able to have a relationship with the University, because it also creates an opportunity for their kids to start thinking about college. There’s a lot of really cool things that I feel like can come from me having had this internship, and nurturing that relationship with them this summer.”

The summer was also a lesson in finding her own voice, Rivas said.

“This was the first time where I was the youngest person in the room... and it was also intimidating because all these people were amazing community organizers,” Rivas said. But Rivas found her colleagues were interested in her perspective as a college student, and a first generation college student. “It really started to make me feel like my voice mattered, because they were like, we need your opinions, we need your ideas.

“I think that was definitely a really good learning curve for me, because especially being in college you're working with people all the time that are the same age as you, and in that same demographic, and so it was just a really cool learning experience on how to connect and communicate with different age groups,” Rivas said.

Rivas says her experience with CIMAS will certainly help her towards her long-term career goal to open a nonprofit centered on providing mental healthcare to low-income families; but she found personal benefits, as well.

“After being here for so long I feel a part of the UNC Asheville community, but I hadn't felt a part of the Asheville community,” Rivas said.

“That's the most rewarding thing, is just being able to now fully feel like Asheville is home.”

Aubrie Holcomb

Senior mass communication major

Asheville City Soccer Club

Aubrie Holcomb had never written a sports article before this summer, but she had taken a news writing class and had a passion for sports. She combined her two interests in a summer internship with Asheville City Soccer Club as their communications and game day operations intern.

“Since I'd never written about sports and never written about soccer I was surprised how interested people were in it,” Holcomb said, “And there's so many ways to write about sports.”

Holcomb was excited by the community that had formed around the Asheville City Soccer Club, and found that focusing on personal stories, like the youngest player on the men’s team making an incredible save, or the emotional reaction of the women’s soccer coach after winning a tough, tight game, helped her create interesting and engaging articles. She anticipates her improved writing skills will be an asset to her in her classes.

“After games I would have to write a post game article pretty quickly,” Holcomb said. “I learned how to really crank out an article. I think that will really help me. I was able to crank it out while editing, and it wasn't sloppy, it was well thought out. I think that'll help me from an academic standpoint.”

In addition to developing new skills, Holcomb also enjoyed the teamwork aspect of the internship. All the interns would help with gameday set up, or would step in to assist if the merch tent got busy or the concession stands needed more supplies.

“I also got to meet super cool people; all the interns I worked with were so fun,” Holcomb said. “I not only gained career strength, I made friends. And everyone likes to make friends.”

Rogelio Gomez Zacarias

Senior Spanish major with education licensure

Bibliotequitas

You’ve probably seen a Little Free Library in your neighborhood or around town—there’s even one on campus by Phillips Hall. The small structures house free book exchanges, where community members can take a book or leave a book. Rogelio Gomez Zacarias and his classmate, Anya Tucker, developed a series of special Spanish language little libraries, or bibliotequitas.

“We just wanted to bring something to the community that promotes our language, our culture, our roots,” Gomez Zacarias said.

“It would be a safe space for expression, for bilingualism, for any sort of culture that isn't just the mainstream Americanized way and contemporary English. There are other stories that need to be talked about, and need to be shared, so that stuff doesn’t get lost.”

Gomez Zacarias realized at a young age that he had nearly lost the ability to speak, read and write in Spanish.

“Something in middle school woke up inside me, and I was like, dude, you have to learn that language,” he said. “You can’t not be able to communicate with your parents or your culture. I started to teach myself how to read Spanish.”

He began with two copies of his favorite book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—one in English and one in Spanish--and read through them both, line by line. With the bibliotequitas, Gomez Zacarias hopes to provide members of the Latinx community in Buncombe County with the resources to connect with the language and culture he nearly lost.

“We’ve curated different topics,” Gomez Zacarias said, “ranging from indigenous stories, indigenous perspectives of Latin America, books that are in Spanish--that can be horror, books for toddlers, learning how to read, learning how to write, and we have some grammar books, also. We have a lot of mystery books, and some cookbooks pertaining to health and wellness.”

Gomez Zacarias is especially excited about the horror books, although he isn’t a horror fan himself. “I hate watching horror movies, it’s so scary,” he said. “But I think we did a great job trying to capture these Spanish horror stories, involving La Llorona, and El Cucuy. Those are really fun reads because they have different ideas of these monsters, kind of like Frankenstein, or Bigfoot.”

Of course, he also made sure to include Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

The bibliotequitas themselves were built by Enka High School students taking woodworking courses. “We wanted the students to feel like they put some part of themselves into this,” Gomez Zacarias explained. Students also decorated and painted the libraries. He hopes the students’ involvement in building the structures will ignite their interest in the contents of the bibliotequitas, as well.

Gomez Zacarias and Tucker are installing the bibliotequitas in areas easily accessible by students and families, such as locations near schools or bus stops. Maintaining the little libraries will be a partnership between the UNC Asheville students and the community, with Gomez Zacarias and Tucker providing the starting books, a curated reading list, and repair supplies, and the local communities continuing to care for the libraries. Bibliotequitas are being placed in Latinx communities across Buncombe County in collaboration with organizations like Emma Elementary School, Colaborativa La Milpa, and Bounty and Soul.

“We want it to be a beautiful thing that means something to the community,” Gomez Zacarias said. “We wanted to just plant little seeds, a little idea, that Spanish is important, our culture is important, and the community responded really well to it. We cared for it, we took a lot of time to set this stuff up...and we’re seeing it grow even to this day.”

Hayley Kintz

Sophomore history major with teacher licensure

Asheville Museum of Science

A local science museum might not be the first place you’d expect to find a history major, but for Haley Kintz an internship at the Asheville Museum of Science (AMOS) was a perfect fit.

“I am so excited to have this experience because I want to learn more about archiving and other areas of the museum field that I can study and work in,” Kintz wrote in her blog. Kintz has worked in several museum and archiving positions before, including as an education intern at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC.

Part of Kintz’ internship included creating a Collections Management Plan, or a detailed document explaining why the museum is in business, how it’s operated, etc. It’s the kind of work that an undergraduate student normally wouldn’t have the opportunity to complete, Kintz said.

“It has been so cool to research and write the draft for this because many people don't write these types of documents until they have been to graduate school and have plenty of schooling under their belt, and I wrote one going into my sophomore year of college,” she explained.

“I was super intimidated by the ramifications this policy would create but it was also so exciting to get to write something that would have this impact. I know that after I leave it is going to get drafted again and again by the Board of Directors and those who know more than I do, but it feels so amazing to be able to point at it and say that I helped create it.”

Kintz also helped install AMOS’s Women in STEM Permanent and Digital Exhibit, which features local women in science fields. Kintz jumped at the opportunity for the hands-on work. “At other places that I have worked, I could have only dreamed of being a part of putting up or putting together an exhibit,” she said. “I spent half of my afternoon putting velcro command strips on posters and making sure that the things we hung were level...mixing plaster and spackling holes in the wall.”

Kintz said her various internship experiences have helped her narrow down her career path; she hopes to be a museum educator after she graduates. It’s also helped to guide her towards her passion for history.

“I love reading history and connecting the patterns across different countries and time periods and how they mirror our society today,” Kintz said. “One of my favorite quotes that I feel encompasses why I think history is so important is carved outside the National Archives: ‘What is past is prologue.’”

Ready to jump into your own internship? The Career Center will host The Internship Event, where employers pitch their internship opportunities to students, at noon on Thursday, Oct. 21. You can also find more expert advice on internships on the Career Center’s blog posts: Benefits of an Internship and Internships– Why Should You Do One and Where Can You Find One?

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