The National Council for Preservation Education (NCPE)’s Internship Program is a partnership with the National Park Service and other Federal agencies with cultural resource protection and public land management responsibilities. Its purpose is to accomplish needed and important work on federally protected lands while providing program participants with professional experience in their chosen fields. Interns work under the guidance of agency staff to complete projects or undertake programs in furtherance of the park’s mission.

To be eligible, applicants must be between 18 and 30 years old (or 35 if a veteran) when starting the internship, a college student or recent graduate (within the past 12 months at the time of application), enrolled in a degree-seeking program, and a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.  

The Cultural Resource Geographic Information Systems facility (CRGIS) is creating an NPS-wide national cultural resource GIS data set, incorporating all of the NPS national inventory databases.  At this time, CRGIS is focusing on incorporating the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscape Survey (HABS/HAER/HALS) database into the enterprise.  The internship would be located jointly with CRGIS and HABS/HAER/HALS of the NPS, focusing on creating the necessary GIS data to represent the resources in the HABS/HAER/HALS inventory.

The internship further meets several of the Department of Interior’s priorities, particularly focusing on the streamlining of environmental and regulatory review, among others.  The internship will result in the creation of additional digital spatial data identifying cultural resources documented by HABS/HAER/HALS.  By creating this spatial data and incorporating it into the existing cultural resource national GIS data set, this project will help to streamline the regulatory review process through the integration of databases, creation of spatial data to find resources for planning purposes, as well as sharing this information with the public.  This project will help to identify those resources where baseline documentation, meeting regulatory requirements, has already been created, reducing regulatory response times, reducing mitigation efforts, and providing a more coordinated approach to resource management throughout the NPS.

The internship would involve examining the original HABS/HAER/HALS documentation through the Library of Congress website to find any clues to locations through the descriptions/photo captions/short histories, etc. The intern would then be responsible for converting this information into point GIS data through tools like Google Earth or ESRI ArcPro.  The intern would be responsible for confirming that the resource still exists, and incorporating the GIS data into the existing NPS cultural resource spatial data transfer standards, and eventually into the national cultural resource data set.

A background security investigation may be required prior to the start date. All NCPE internships accrue 4 hours of PTO for every 80 hours worked.

Qualified NCPE interns who complete their internships may count their position towards earning a Public Land Corps (PLC) Non-Competitive Hiring Authority certificate.  Once earned, the PLC certificate may be used to apply for eligible Federal permanent, temporary, or term positions. Visit https://preservenet.org/ncpe-internships/ for details about this benefit. Successful completion of the internship does not guarantee Federal employment.