Avetec Uses Stimulus Funds to Create Summer Internships for NASIC
Stimulus funds provided internship opportunities for eight Clark County college students through Avetec, a non-profit corporation established by the National Center for Advanced Modeling and Simulation located in the Nextedge Park.
Cathy Balas, Avetec executive director for education and communications said, “This program was a national first of its kind.” The internship engaged older youth in open source intelligence work for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) whose national headquarters are at Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB).
Goals of the program included:
- Explore research careers available in the region
- Gain viable career experience to build a resume
- Encourage continuing education and demonstrate feasibility of internships with NASIC
The project timeline began June 1, 2009 and ended on August 6, 2009. Interns were involved in team building exercises, onsite NASIC/WPAFB visits; open source data/technical writing training, introduced to advanced open source procurement, evaluation and dissemination (OPED) analysis tools and project briefings.
At the end of the project, student interns produced three final written reports that were delivered to NASIC in both hard copy and on CD disks. Reporting encompassed each team's analysis and findings and documented all sources. The reports ranged in length from 28 to 91 pages and cited a total of 257 sources. The outcome of the reports was that NASIC obtained a realistic picture of the availability of open source information on important topics and plans to use the data to publish NASIC intelligence reports on the three subjects. This will allow the youth to indicate on their resumes that they have authorship of a published national intelligence report.
The experience gained through this program encouraged the interns to continue their education. Of the eight interns, one has pending employment with NASIC, six returned to college and one graduated with an associate's degree and is seeking full-time employment to help pay for a bachelor's degree.
