The Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) mission is to be a leader in restoring, maintaining and enhancing the quality of Oregon’s air, land, and water. DEQ ASE interns will participate in environmental data collection and analysis in support of public health and environmental protection.
Air quality is an inherent part of our everyday lives. As an Oregon resident, you’ve almost certainly experienced days with wildfire smoke, wood stove smoke, or air stagnation events. Open your Oregon Air app on your phone and you can see the closest Air Quality Index (AQI) readings in your area. These are based off data collected by the Air Quality Monitoring (AQM) team in the Oregon DEQ Laboratory Environmental Assessment Division (LEAD). AQM is seeking an intern to contribute to state air quality data collection efforts by working directly with sensors and data collection code to provide data to the public.
The AQM intern will work with sensors, dataloggers, and data acquisition software used at state air monitoring sites and have their work contribute to public knowledge. They will learn how to integrate sensors and read environmental data from them by programming dataloggers and instruments. Activities will include writing code, testing sensors, performing calibrations, and integrating various instruments and technologies to test different approaches for performing air quality and meteorological measurements.
Students should be prepared to ask questions, early and often! This information and skillset can be tricky to learn and understand. Trial and error are important, and we often learn after a lot of tries. This is a part-time in-person internship, with the expectation that the intern will work at least 200 hours over the course of the summer.
Students must be minimum age specified by June 15. These age requirements are strictly enforced by the mentoring organization, and there are no exceptions.
We strongly encourage students to apply who are from one or more systemically and historically excluded group, including but not limited to, non-cis-gendered students, girls, BIPOC, first-generation college-bound students, low-income/low-resourced students, students with disabilities, students who are neurodivergent, and those who speak a primary language other than English.
If you have any questions about the application, website technical issues and/or this position description, please contact Saturday Academy at ase@saturdayacademy.org. Do not contact the mentor directly. Contacting the mentor directly is grounds for disqualification of your ASE application.