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. The 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 who are subject area experts to carry out the mission of the park.

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.  

This internship will help the National Park Service honor the civil rights stories of struggle, perseverance, and activism in the pursuit of education equity at Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park in the capital city of Kansas–Topeka. Just an hour west of Kansas City and twenty miles west of Lawrence, Topeka was one of the communities that contributed a court case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. It remains a vibrant, multicultural community committed to the pursuit of equality.

The park needs to transition fully into the digital age. First, it requires the help of an intern who can finish the consolidation and arrangement of about 30 linear feet of paper records dating back to the park’s creation in 1992. Next, the intern will work with the curatorial staff at an NPS multi-park curatorial facility to digitize and catalog the records. Then the intern will devise an electronic filing plan to manage the creation, arrangement, and preservation of new records moving forward.

In addition, the intern will assist park rangers with the description and arrangement of hundreds of hours of analog and digital oral history recordings. If time allows, the intern will also edit transcripts and prepare them for posting on the park’s website.

This is an in-person, full-time position for the summer, and may transition to part-time is the fall, if needed. A background security investigation may be required before 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 can 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.