This summer, close to 100 Pomona students and their respective workplaces were beneficiaries of the Pomona College Internship Program (PCIP). A win-win situation for everyone involved, PCIP funding allows students to take on unpaid or low-paid opportunities while organizations gain interns eager to contribute and learn.
Malu Estoducto ’27, Freddie Ambrose ’27, Ashley Dangol ’28 and Carlin Lee ’28 each interned with government or government-adjacent organizations this summer. Through PCIP funding, they were able to explore career options they might not have been able to otherwise.
Finding a Place in Local Government
Estoducto, an economics and politics double major from Santa Maria, Brazil, learned about the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors while taking a class on local politics at Claremont McKenna College.
“L.A. County is such a big jurisdiction, and the Board of Supervisors does so much work because they have so many constituents,” says Estoducto, who plans to work in local government.
As an intern with Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell’s office, Estoducto focused on participatory budgeting, a collaborative process in which community members decide how to allocate a public budget. Estoducto traveled to different field offices daily, attended community events related to participatory budgeting projects, and joined community walks to hear directly from Mitchell’s constituents.
“It’s a very participatory model of democracy,” she says. “It’s one of the best ways to uplift historically disempowered groups as they make decisions for their communities.”
When she wasn’t in the field, Estoducto conducted policy research examining how participatory budgeting is implemented in other cities in order to improve L.A. County’s process.
“I learned a lot from joining many important meetings and felt like I was really part of the team,” she says. “They really wanted me to be in places where I could make a meaningful contribution.”
As this year’s Pomona College student body president, Estoducto says the internship taught her how a team can come together to find solutions to problems.
It also strengthened her confidence as a leader and provided assurance for life after college.
“Before the internship, I was scared and nervous about graduating,” she says, “but now I feel much more prepared. I feel like there might be a place for me in local government.”
Education in the Great Outdoors
Ambrose, a philosophy major, returned home to Longmont, Colorado, to intern at Rocky Mountain National Park.
With plans to teach as a career, Ambrose worked with the interpretation, outreach and education team and valued the opportunity to practice hands-on education with people of different ages.
“I was interacting with two-year-olds all the way up to seniors,” he says.
Ambrose taught park visitors about everything from animals and trees found in the park to astronomy and astrology during night sky programs. He also had the opportunity to create his own programming and to make use of his philosophy major for his pop-up program on wildflowers and the relationship between knowledge and beauty.
With recent funding cuts to national parks, PCIP support was instrumental in securing Ambrose an internship that helped fill a gap.
“To be able to work for and provide help to the park system, which I’ve always loved, and at a park that was really close to home, to me was amazing,” says Ambrose.
Exploring the World of Development
Dangol, an economics major from Richmond, California, interned with the Texas Census Institute (TxCI), an independent, non-partisan organization seeking to ensure an accurate census count in Texas in 2030.
Dangol found the position through the Career Development Office at Pomona. Brandolyn Thomas ’24, who works as a program and insights manager at TxCI, served as the point of connection and steered Dangol to the development arm of the organization.
“I appreciate that TxCI gave me so much insight into what the world of development looks like,” she says. “Grant research was something completely new to me.”
Dangol was able to support fundraising, outreach, research and partnership development efforts. Her area of focus was helping the organization integrate AI into its daily operations, and she says she “learned a lot about the tools day to day.”
Through the internship, Dangol gained clarity about where her “strengths and interests lie,” she says, and hopes to explore development economic research next.
Building a Future in Biochemistry
Lee, a chemistry major from Palo Alto, California, worked on protein crystallography of extremophile organisms at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a Department of Energy national lab run by Stanford University.
The internship built on Lee’s undergraduate research at Pomona, which primarily involves growing and purifying proteins. At SLAC, she was able to crystallize the proteins before collecting data.
“In terms of collecting synchrotron data, you need a synchrotron beamline to do that,” says Lee. “Being able to collect the data myself and learn the software was really cool.”
While Lee already had plans to earn a Ph.D. in biochemistry, she says the internship helped confirm that she would want to specialize in protein crystallography.
Professor of Chemistry Matthew Sazinski, Lee’s faculty advisor at Pomona, was a former collaborator of Lee’s mentor at SLAC, and Sazinski reached out personally to set up the internship on Lee’s behalf.
Now that the research portion is over, Lee is working with her mentor to write a paper and submit it to an undergraduate journal.
PCIP made it possible for her to intern with a U.S. government entity, says Lee.
“Being able to get funding to have this opportunity to get myself to this place was very important to me.”