Department of Environment & Conservation
Jim Fyke, Commissioner

Intern Opportunities

at the Tennessee Department
of Environment and Conservation

College students can gain valuable experience while working for TDEC!
TDEC Bureau of Environment General Information Majors of interest

The Bureau of Environment primarily employs college students majoring in the sciences and engineering in the intern positions. Knowledge of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a plus for many of the assignments. There are some limited opportunities for students majoring in marketing, accounting or business.

Student classifications

Internships are available to students from freshman classification through graduate school. Interns must be full-time students.

Pay

Interns are typically paid at the hourly rate of $8.85 per hour (equivalent to a Clerk 2, salary grade 010 in the state compensation system.)

Intern work locations

Bureau of Environment interns can be employed at the TDEC’s central office in downtown Nashville, as well as at the eight Environmental Field Offices across the state (Memphis, Jackson, Nashville, Cookeville, Columbia, Knoxville, Johnson City and Chattanooga.) The availability of positions is determined annually by the need and budgets of the environmental programs.

Internship length

Interns in TDEC’s Bureau of Environment are typically employed during the summer (May through August). However, interns may be retained on a part-time basis through the year depending upon the needs and budget of the hiring division.

Typical intern assignments

The following is a sampling of past intern assignments:

Water sampling, measuring flow, entering data into computer, collecting parameters from streams, cleaning the lab.

Technical assistance in making sure that spreadsheets and databases were working right and created correctly for the data that needed to be analyzed, outreach at baseball parks and racetracks, created a manual for county officials so that they could design and potentially run their own permanent household hazardous waste facility.

Collecting Global Positioning System coordinates on Underground Storage Tank facilities.

Conducting investigations on Open Burning Complaints and issuing violations as well as advisements when necessary, collating and reorganizing air pollution files, participating in emission source complaints and inspections, aiding in the routine audit of regional air monitoring stations as well as analysis of data retrieved from ozone monitors. 

Determining latitude /longitude coordinates on High Quality waters using ArcGIS software and putting those coordinates into a file so that they can be uploaded into a web page. Information will eventually be accessible by the public and by state and federal agencies interested in permitting and other applications.