For those of you who may not know, the MSIM program requires an internship of all its graduates. One of the possibilities I came across is with the Washington State Department of Ecology. From what I understand, this would involve working with them on the state’s sustainability measurements, coming up with a better framework that would allow them to produce these reports more effectively.

I talked briefly with the person that suggested this as a internship project: it turns out that the state’s sustainability work actually started in about 2005. The overall idea is that all state agencies collect roughly the same data and report on their consumption. Example measurements include gasoline use, electricity use and the amount of recycled paper used. The state is really quite serious about this effort, so much so that Governor Gregoire has issued a Climate Change Challenge to the state. The Department of Ecology has been responsible for the majority of the organization of this project, though there seems to be some state-level involvement. The sheer scale of this project seems quite impressive, and I would really look forward to being able to do this as a project. Though I was a little doubtful, it sounds as if the MSIM program actually allows for programming as a major part of the internship. It sounds as if I may be well prepared by taking INFO 498 next quarter, since that will introduce me to C# as a programming language, which will be quite an interesting experience, since it will be my first introduction to .NET as a programming architecture.

I am quite eager to see whether or not this will work out as an internship. I’ll keep this blog updated as I get more information.

By the way, I wrote this whole blog post using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which was an interesting experience.