State offering grants to companies, organizations to host high school interns

A summer coding internship at NewBoCo in Cedar Rapids went so well that Jefferson High School Senior Patrick Turu used it as a springboard to get an Information Technology internship at Involta, a Cedar Rapids-based data services company.

“I can’t help but feel DeltaV was responsible for giving us that energy and passion to want to explore our career choices,” Turu said during NewBoCo’s 2021 annual meeting. “I’d recommend it to students who have been curious about this field. It gives you a good introduction because you get to do things professionals would do.”

Turu was one of eight Cedar Rapids high school students who completed the DeltaV Code School internship last summer. The five-week internship was funded in part by a $9,350 grant from the Future Ready Iowa’s Summer Youth Internship Project.

The grant to internship partners NewBoCo, Kirkwood Community College’s Workplace Learning Connection and the Cedar Rapids Community School District paid for each intern to get a laptop and a desktop computer, as well as other hardware, to use during the internship and to keep for future programming.

“On the very first day of the class, the students sat down at the desk and plugged in the computer for the first time and started to configure everything,” said Dan Tuuri, a DeltaV instructor at NewBoCo. “We started installing operating systems and figuring out how to automate certain features and set up networks.”

Nearly every day of the internship the students had hand-on labs involving topics that included deploying the structure of an active directory, allowing a server to adequately manage a computer system, managing files with encryption and recovering data after a disaster, Tuuri said.

The students also heard from guest speakers from different companies, including Involta, about their IT needs and job opportunities.

“It can be really tough for a young adult to think about all their career options,” Tuuri said. “When we have the opportunity to give someone a little experience, a taste, where they can decide if they want to pursue it without a four-year degree we can meet a workforce need more quickly.”

Future Ready Iowa’s Summer Youth Internship Project provided $1.61 million in grants last year to 26 companies or organizations providing high school internships. These internships included landscaping, custom meat processing, nursing, utility management and engineering, among other disciplines.

Other Corridor programs that got state grants for 2021 internships were:

The state recently announced another round of funding for companies, nonprofits, educational and community groups seeking to provide high school students with internships for this summer.

The state allocated $250,000 for the program this summer. Applications must be submitted through www.IowaGrants.gov by March 2.

Priority for funding will be given to programs that provide internships to high school youth who are at risk of not graduating, from low-income households, from communities underrepresented in the Iowa workforce, or who otherwise face barriers to success and upward mobility in the labor market.

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