Environmental Progress - Winter 2000

Unique GPSI Internships Let Students Forecast Own Futures

Program moves the classroom into the real world.

Mark Hertko, GPSI intern with the Office of community Relations, helps man a booth demonstrating Agency involvement in the removal of PCB contaminated soils from Waukegan Harbor.

In the mid-70s, the graduate program at what was then Sangamon State University in Springfield undertook an unusual enhancement to its program offerings. To improve the caliber of employees entering state government posts, it offered an internship program that would let a graduate student spend approximately as much time working at a state agency as the student spent in the classroom during the two year graduate program. The “real world” experience would count toward Masters Degree qualifications.

One intern accepted the challenge and the program was inaugurated.

Over the next two decades, Sangamon State became the University of Illinois at Springfield and graduate student applications began rolling in from around the country. Today, interns in the Graduate Public Service Internship program can be found in most large state agencies and in the offices of elected officials, sometimes including the governor’s office. This year, there are 13 working at the Illinois EPA.

Agency Librarian Nancy Simpson, second from left, briefs GPSI's on resources available in the IEPA library. From left, the interns are Mark Hertko, Irina Soutskover, Brian Gyorkos, Kristin VanAken, Andrea Bostwick and Brad Ettlie.

Applicants can be enrolled in any Master’s Degree specialty. Of those who apply, approximately one in five will be selected to fill an internship. Graduates now hold jobs in federal, state and municipal governments, are in law school, and working in Europe and Africa.

The Illinois EPA has supported the innovative program from its early days, and a number of GPSI interns have come back to work at the Agency. Kristin VanAken, a GPSI intern currently working with the Office of Public Information, summed up her reaction to the program: “The partnership UIS has with government agencies provides a wonderful opportunity to still be a student working toward a goal while getting a taste of the working world or the "real" world. I feel that at the end of two years I will have earned a professional degree but perhaps what is most valuable is the practical experience I am gaining while working at the Agency.”