GREEN COVE SPRINGS – An internship may evoke memories of retrieving coffee, lunch or completing other menial tasks to waste summer for a line on a resumé.

That was exactly what the city of Green Cove Springs set out to avoid. Its first internship program was based around projects. Department supervisors drew up tasks and four interns were put to work about 20-30 hours a week.

Green Cove Human Resources Director Mary Jane Lundy brought the internship program before council members in September. The program derived from Palm Coast’s format.

“We followed [Palm Coast’s] program in a lot of ways. A lot of people have an old impression of an internship, that you hire someone to sit beside you all day and watch you, run errands and pick up lunch,” Lundy said. “That’s absolutely what we were not going to do.”

Laura Romito is a senior at the University of North Florida, with a major in economics and a minor in math. She worked with the finance department.

“I’ve lived in Green Cove my whole life and it would be really cool to see how the government works here,” Romito said. “That's what appealed to me most.”

One task required her to look through old public records.

“You get to see how the city has developed over time,” Romito said. “We looked at records from the 1970s and the accountants had to write down every little thing.”

Jack Taylor, a Virginia Tech senior who interned with Public Works, was from Annapolis, Md. Taylor had to update the city’s utility map and identify utility poles. He said it was interesting to see the impact of local government.

“In the classroom, you’re already working with huge data sets, but here you’re actually collecting the data,” Taylor said. “You get the experience of figuring out where all that comes from. I thought for a second, ‘Am I actually going to finish this?’ But it looks like I am.”

From Green Cove Springs, UNF senior Cody Ackerman said he learned a lot of web design and development from the internship. Ackerman was converting the Public Works inventory system to a web-based system, where staff could use an app to log inventory.

“I wanted to see how the city functioned internally,” he said.

As a recent graduate from the University of Florida, Hannah Grimm said she hoped to work at the state level. A local government body in her hometown suited her well, Grimm said. She mapped out the city’s stormwater systems.

“A lot of what I learned in school was abstract, so getting to see it in a concrete way and what you would actually do with that was very helpful,” Grimm said. “When there’s an issue they can pull up a virtual map instead of a large map book.”

The paid interns began in early June and will finish later this month.