Trinity students secure jobs and internships for the summer

Students share summer plans, express excitement to gain experience or make money

Stress and time management take on a whole new meaning at the end of the spring semester, a time when most students are wrapping up their classes while simultaneously solidifying their summer plans. The idea of securing a job or internship for the summer can be daunting. However, once secured, the excitement for hands-on experience and new opportunities sets in. As students take advantage of the numerous opportunities Trinity offers or look to hometown businesses for work, they dip their toes into their career-driven futures.

Trinity Wagner, a first-year engineering science major, secured an engineering and material sciences research internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for the summer. The internship is sponsored by Texas A&M University, but the application was open to all college students.

“I’m excited for more of a practical application of what we’re actually going to be learning and seeing how research and working with people with high degrees […] goes,” Wagner said.

Wagner will be working under a mentor, focusing on material equations of state. She said that throughout the internship, she will be running calculations of materials to generate energy vs. volume curves and then seeing how they apply to different forms and different types of data.

Blaine Martin, a first-year international studies and political science major, said that his Spanish professor told him about Trinity’s MAS Alvarez Summer Internship Grant program and that it sounded like the perfect fit for him. The program awards a $4000 stipend to students who do unpaid internships at non-profit organizations that work with the Latinx community. Martin will be working with the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, a local non-profit organization that promotes peace, justice and cultural preservation, and he will focus on the protection and preservation of different historical sites around San Antonio that are tied to the Chicano movement. As a native of Midland, TX, he said that he always knew he wanted to stay in San Antonio during the summer to establish roots here and develop a network of community connections.

“I found out about the internship and I viewed it as a potential opportunity to do that[…] The only opportunity I had lined out for the summer was being a waiter at a restaurant [back home] and this opportunity provides a much more connected position to my potential future career,” Martine said.

While internships are a great way to gain experience in a field of interest, some students choose to work a full or part-time job over the summer. For the past five years, Keller Maharrey, senior business administration major, has spent his summers fighting wildfires throughout the western United States.

“We work like 16-hour days most of the time […] and then we work for 14 days straight […] It’s a hell of a job and it allows me to pack in the money over the summers and not have to work as much during the school year,” Maharrey said.

Maharrey said that he tends to be assigned to fight a wildfire right before school starts every year because August is the height of wildfire season.

“Basically every year I’ve shown up [to school] like a day after being on a forest fire and so it’s kind of always been like this crazy whiplash where I just go from a million miles an hour on a forest fire to coming to school,” Maharrey said.

This summer will be Maharrey’s last wildfire-fighting season.

“I had an opportunity to be on a hotshot crew this summer, which is kind of like the Navy Seals of firefights, and so I really couldn’t turn down that opportunity. It was kind of always my goal in firefighting,” Maharrey said.

The experience and knowledge gained from working over the summer can be invaluable and point students to what they ultimately want to do post-college. Once those summer plans are set in stone, it is hard to be anything but excited to embark on something that could shape one’s career path.