According to White Mountain National Forest (WMNF) internship supervisor for Recreation Management and Policy students:
The partnership between the White Mountain National Forest, U.S. Forest Service and University of New Hampshire is critical, both in terms of recruiting future employees of the Forest Service and also accomplishing research that helps us in our management decisions that are critical for the White Mountain National Forest.
The benefit to the students of the experience of coming here and being interns is they get a broad exposure to the multiple-use mission... to all the different programs that that we have: recreation, wildlife archaeology, botany, timber management... there's so many they get exposure to... The complicated task of Land Management and all that goes into making decisions so that we're protecting resources, providing experiences to the public and fulfilling the economic needs of our communities who rely on on the White Mountain National Forest.
What I learned from the students is that they're coming in with a with a fresh mind and tenacity, passion. They want to learn and it it energizes the workforce. You know, when you've been in the workforce for a little while, you're used to doing the same things but when students come in and ask questions that you're not necessarily used to hearing or thinking about it really helps folks who have been doing it for a long time learn from from the students and then vice versa, by default those questions are helping the students learn as well. This is an incredible benefit for the students of UNH to come here and do an internship because they get that not only the experience but they get credit for the hours they work and it gives them a competitive advantage to applying to Federal positions into the future.
