What is it really like to intern? We asked, and Cougs responded! From landing the internship to making an impact on the job, #CougsIntern across industries, organizations, and communities. We celebrate these amazing Cougs as they share highlights from their experience!
Meet Reese, a recent intern with the Council for the Homeless. Reese is currently studying Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Washington State University.
Highlights from Reese’s internship
‘Interning with the Council for the Homeless has allowed me to get program management experience in the housing services field, learn from a memorable team, and contribute to work that improves quality of life in our community. The Council team, with about 38 staff members during Summer 2026, is composed of characters who are dedicated yet still fun amid the high-inequality housing system that structures our lives. During conversations with team members, including 12 informational interviews that I conducted, I got to consider perspectives across topics like personal histories, educational and professional backgrounds, expected and unexpected challenges in the field and their roles, and cultures with housing systems that they admire or look to as a model. As a sociology major, it’s been exciting to learn that at least three team members have a BA in Sociology. While their positions don’t have “sociologist” in the title, they do work that is sociological in nature and earn good salaries. Others who attended college have degrees in fields like social work, community development, women’s and gender studies, English, theatre, psychology, and data analytics. Getting to meet housing services participants has also been important. Lived experience of homelessness is a kind of knowledge that should be valued. Many staff members at Council bring this experience too.
CFTH team during a summer celebration. Photo courtesy of Meghan B., shared by Reese A.
I’ve worked on a couple dozen projects so far. One standout has been leading a youth-facing resource navigation presentation project with a team at Council called Community for Functional Zero. My team members were in a program where they received housing services from Council as participants and also gained paid work experience with the organization. Our presentation begins with covering how common it is for young people to experience homelessness. For example, we cite a study published in 2018 called the Voices of Youth Count Comprehensive Report: Youth Homelessness in America, which estimates that 4.2 million teens and young adults ages 13 to 25 in the United States experienced homelessness in 2017. Using a strength-based approach, we then detail the importance of connecting with others in order to find community and access resources. We frame asking for help as a skill. To share local resources transparently, we summarize the Council for the Homeless Clark County Resource Guide. From there, we emphasize that being persistent and communicative while utilizing resources helps ensure that a participant will satisfy requirements and fully receive the resource. Our presentation ends with stating that positive change is possible. We also assisted with operating a youth resource pop-up in the lawn out front of the Council building. This involved sharing housing and employment resources as well as free lunch for all who wanted it.
A surprisingly memorable project was finding videos on housing and homelessness in the Portland metro area for the Community for Functional Zero team to watch as part of their training. This required filtering through lots of slop on YouTube and locating credible groups elsewhere, then seeing if they’ve published videos. With a topic as divisive as homelessness, using search engines to find videos on the topic will bring up ones that have hundreds of thousands or millions of views but have deep reliability issues, such as lacking methodologically sound research or involving commentators who sensationalize social issues for profit. The videos that I found to be high quality emphasize good research, institutional knowledge, public policy, law, or the perspectives of those most impacted. Funnily enough, many of these videos have very few views, like less than 5,000 or even less than 50. The channel with videos I most frequently used for training material is Homelessness PDX, which showcases work by Portland State University’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative. Some of their videos are animated presentations of research, others are live action, and others are audio from the collaborative’s podcast, the Understanding Homelessness Podcast.
A research project I’m currently working on is analyzing 40 lease agreements, using Excel to make sense of the extra fees that property owners have charged Council participants or have the ability to charge. Some examples from move-in accounting receipts include application fees ranging from $25 to $100, a “new account fee” of $17, a $250 “admin fee,” move-in fees ranging from $200 to $300, non-refundable carpet cleaning fees ranging from $400 to $500, and a non-refundable $400 pet cleaning fee alongside a $1,810 security deposit. Some examples of incidental fees that could be charged include an unauthorized occupant fee of $300, fees to regain entry if locked out ranging from $20 to $150, dishonored check fees ranging from $35 to $50, unauthorized pet fees ranging from $50 to $500, a flea spraying charge of $35, non-compliance fees ranging from $25 to $250, a notice of lease violation posting fee of $25, a vacancy cost recovery fee of $50, administration fees ranging from $25 to $250, late rent payment fees ranging from $25 to $200, a water sensor tampering fee of $100, smoke alarm or carbon monoxide alarm tampering fees ranging from $150 to $250, alarm or smoke detector neglect charges of $60, key replacement fees ranging from $5 to $50, early lease termination charges ranging from $1,250 to $3,620, and damage repair estimates that could be charged upon move-out ranging from $5 to $5,000 per repair or replacement as well as labor or admin rates of up to $70 per hour. The underlying profit motive and lack of specificity on record for certain fees is troubling for people trying to exit homelessness, as they’re often exhausted, have little economic capital, and lack convenient legal representation. Additionally, some documents are more time-consuming and difficult to interpret than others. On one end, some lease agreements use charts to quantify all monthly and common potential incidental costs near the beginning of the document. On the other, some have numbers spread throughout bulky paragraphs spanning over 70 pages.
Other work I’ve done with Council includes facilitating events and workshops with partner organizations at a local resource center, creating flyers for events, printing resource guides, packaging supplies for community members, digitizing documents, collaborating to streamline training registration processes, updating an affordable housing list, providing information and feedback for a blog post, and adding resource guides to collections at my campus. As for training I’ve done, the topics span housing services philosophies and strategies, with some examples being coordinated entry, housing first, progressive engagement, diversion, rapid rehousing, low barrier services and harm reduction, trauma-informed services, supporting survivors of domestic violence, racial equity, LGBTQ+ competency, and motivational interviewing; case management; policies and laws like the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act (RCW 59.18) and Fair Housing rights; software like the CARE Tool and Homeless Management Information System (HMIS); and shadowing housing assessments at a local shelter.
I want to share the words of a participant. This person is a longtime resident of Clark County, where the Council for the Homeless is located, and has seen it grow and change over the decades. At the end of our conversation, they said of our community members, “You might not like what they’re doing, but you have to love them.”‘
From application to interview – how preparation, experience, and intentionality helped Reese secure the internship
‘I got this internship through the Future Leaders Project at WSU Vancouver. The timeline of applying for the internship to my first day in the position spanned just over two months. I applied to participate on March 9th, interviewed with a Future Leaders Project panel comprised of two WSU Vancouver Career Action Center staff members and one Columbia River Economic Development Council staff member on April 2nd, interviewed with agencies in late April, received offers in late April, accepted an offer by the end of the month, and began my orientation and first day with the Council for the Homeless on May 13th. FLP internships start in June by default, but some organizations are cool with interns starting in May.
Outside of interviewing and following up with hiring managers over email, I did not do any networking to get this role. I met all staff members involved in the hiring process for the first time during interviews. That being said, building social capital through networking can be very important and has helped me get other positions. One of them, a research assistantship, only happened because I emailed a professor and met with them a few times.
I think a number of things helped me stand out as a candidate. First, I brought work experience related to a number of the Future Leaders Project positions. Most notably, from April 2024 to May 2025, I served 2,500+ hours as an AmeriCorps member with College Possible, a national nonprofit that supports students from low-income backgrounds with college access and success. Between my two terms of service, first as a College Transition Coach and then as a College Success Coach, I managed two caseloads totaling 335+ students and facilitated events at 10+ high schools and colleges. The bulk of my work with College Possible consisted of supporting 135+ upper-division (junior and senior standing) Portland State University students across academic, financial, personal, and cultural/social areas. I was told by one hiring manager at a Future Leaders Project site that my application stood out because of my AmeriCorps experience.
Second, I did my research on each organization before interviewing. This meant browsing their websites, reading publicly available documents like impact summaries, learning terminology, attempting to understand discourses in the field, leaning into curiosity. I remember one hiring manager liking the fact that I found a YouTube video from several years ago of their facility being toured.
Third, I shared relevant leadership and volunteering experience. For example, from October 2024 to March 2025, I volunteered with CityTeam in Portland, working a food and clothing drive, connecting with food-insecure and unhoused community members, and assembling and distributing care packages around the Central Eastside subdistrict.
Fourth, I communicated my lived experience in ways I considered relevant to the goals of the Future Leaders Project and its community partners. For example, I mentioned being a first-generation college student in my cover letter and during interviews. This and other forms of self-disclosure, which were intentional and context-dependent, may have indicated an ability to build real rapport with staff and program participants, as well as to produce work that’s more “in touch” than not and would likely benefit our community.
Lastly, I had already completed a bachelor’s degree, a BA in Social Sciences, through the WSU Global Campus in Fall 2023 and was enrolling in the WSU Vancouver BA in Sociology program for Fall 2026 matriculation. The steps taken to become a postbac (second bachelor’s) student in sociology with a plan to subsequently pursue related grad programs and career pathways likely indicated qualities that partners of the Future Leaders Project want in candidates. These might include curiosity, prosociality, critical thinking, communication, inclusion, analytical skills, and determination, among others.’
Advice for aspiring interns
‘There’s a lot of advice out there. I’ll share a few things that have worked for me. One is to proactively communicate with internship stakeholders. In my case for this internship, my communication looked like emailing the Future Leaders Project contact with WSUV to make sure I was eligible, applying, interviewing with the Future Leaders Project panel at WSUV, interviewing with employers, answering phone calls and emails, and importantly, following up with an employer over email. After I received my first offer, which is one that I would have been happy with but wasn’t my first choice, I emailed the Future Leaders Project contact at WSUV to ask for advice on how to navigate the situation. The gist was to email my first choice out of the organizations I had interviewed with to share this information and ask about their hiring timeline, which is what I decided to do. I wrote “FLP Intern Decision Timeline” in the subject line. I shared that I enjoyed our interview, got a good impression of the organization, that I had received another offer but their position was currently my top choice, and that the other agency wanted me to accept or decline their offer by end of day Monday (this was a Friday morning). I received a reply that afternoon offering me the position. In my experience, communicating when in doubt helped me at multiple stages.
Another piece of advice is that some policies and procedures are more flexible than they seem at a glance. For example, the timeline on the WSUV Future Leaders Project webpage says that the internships start in June. I did my orientation with Council on May 13th, and my supervisor asked if I wanted to start the following week. I was under the impression that my internship wasn’t supposed to start until June, but that turned out to not be a rule. I was also able to choose when I wanted my internship to end. My supervisor cares about my well-being and suggested an end date in early August so I could get a bit of a break for a week before things ramp up with my other job as an Academic Mentor with TRiO Student Support Services and classes at WSUV begin.
Washington State University Vancouver campus aerial view courtesy of WSU Photo Services.
One you probably hear a lot is to network. I think networking can be really advantageous, especially for those who lack nepotism connections in the first place. Networking can lead to resources, knowledge, reputation, mentorship, influential recommendations, personal growth, and job opportunities in what’s called the hidden job market. As I mentioned above, I got a research assistantship because of networking. I emailed a professor who I had never taken a class with and met with them a few times. We had mutual interest in each other’s research, and then I was set up with an RAship. Unlike most other student jobs, research positions are usually not posted on Handshake or other job sites.
I recommend taking notes during interviews and during your internship. Using a physical notebook can be best, as digital tech can be more distracting. Even if you have a great memory, writing down details for instructions that you’re given can increase the likelihood that you complete things comprehensively. In addition to being an aid to memory and a place to reflect through writing for a better understanding, notetaking can signal that you value what someone has to say.’
