5 Skills I Gained During my Summer with the National Parks Service as a Business Plan Intern
The National Park Service (NPS) is an agency of the United States federal government that manages all U.S. national parks, many American national monuments, and other conservation and historical properties with various title designations. The NPS is charged with a dual role of preserving the ecological and historical integrity of the places entrusted to its management while also making them available and accessible for public use and enjoyment.
The National Parks Business Plan Internship (BPI) is an 11-week consulting internship available for graduate students who are currently enrolled in business, public policy, environmental management, public administration, and related programs with one year left until graduation. Participants work in a national parks or National Park Service regional office across the country where they lead strategic projects that impact the long-term health of these vital American resources.
Today we are interviewing Lisa Yao, a 2019 NPS BPI alumni about her learnings throughout her time at the NPS BPI program. She goes through the most valuable skills and lessons she gained and how she has leveraged those skills after her summer with the National Park Service.
Tell us about yourself! What is your name, university and program that you attended, your BPI year and your professional career?
My name is Lisa Yao and I’m currently doing a joint degree program between the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government; I’m pursuing a joint MBA and a Master’s in Public Administration and International Development. Before I came to graduate school, I worked as a consultant in New York City and then pivoted to work on climate change and waste management at the World Bank. After that, I spent time at a small and medium enterprise investment firm in South Africa.
It’s always been a long-standing dream of mine to be part of the National Park Service. When I was a child, I dreamt of being a park ranger, and have just always been in love with nature and everything that the National Park Service provides to the world. It was a dream come true when I saw that there was a graduate internship program at the NPS, and especially one that would draw upon my past skills, working in consulting as well as on environmental issues. I was excited to apply as my top choice internship and I’m very glad it worked out.
After graduation I’ll be starting a job at Google with their go-to-market strategy team for the Americas. We’ll see where it goes from there, but I’m hoping to be involved in conservation for the rest of my life.
What did your project entail?
I spent my summer at the Harper’s Ferry Center for Interpretive Media in West Virginia. If you’ve ever driven through a park entrance and gotten a brochure or walked through an exhibit at a visitor center, you’ve interacted with the Harpers Ferry Center. The center creates all of the interpretive content and the historical artifacts that are displayed across the national park system.
Last summer, my co-consultant and I worked on two different projects. Our first project addressed cost estimation. The goal of the project was to develop a new standardized process for project budgeting that would increase budgeting accuracy and strengthen data-driven resource allocation for the center as a whole. Ultimately, the goal was to get the best mileage out of the very limited taxpayer driven funding.
Our second project addressed workforce planning. At the Harpers Ferry Center almost 50% of staff were eligible to retire within five years. With this high expected turnover there was a major opportunity to identifying the most mission critical functions for the center’s future and to help it adapt to the digital age with technology and media.
What are the most valuable skills you gained while working with your client? Can you please give context to how you learned/gained each skill?
1. Engaging in meaningful conversations across diverse teams and people
Our projects aimed to put scarce financial and people resources to the best use possible. As part of this project, we integrated feedback across the whole office and interviewed 20 staff members from every single major team, ranging from high level managers and directors to newer employees working on the ground. The project provided a great opportunity to have open conversations across diverse teams and people with different experiences. It taught me how to learn, how to prepare for productive conversations and how to then synthesize their varied experiences and opinions into a very cohesive and prioritized strategy that the Director could use. I enjoyed getting exposure to the insight and ingenuity of longstanding NPS staff members, and then exposing their opinions in a meaningful way.
2. Effectively blending qualitative and quantitative information
The second skill I strengthened was effectively blending qualitative and quantitative information. Both of the projects I worked on demonstrated that neither quantitative nor qualitative information was sufficient on its own. We aggregated a lot of past budgeting data which allowed us to have use a common language when having conversations with staff members. Similarly, when we were looking at the five-year workforce planning exercise, we analyzed historical staffing data to generate a baseline view of what types of skills and capacities were needed in the future. However, when we were looking into the future, we relied on qualitative interviews to recognize new opportunities that the center hadn’t pursued before and to prioritize skills gaps. Again, we had limited resources, so we had to decide what was most important. This is where the qualitative information really came in as it helped us place weight on different options.
3. A visual speaks a thousand words
Our project mentor at the Harper’s Ferry Center took us under his wing to teach us design principles in Adobe illustrator and Adobe InDesign. It was really fun to get a tangible new digital skillset. We used these skills to build and edit visually attractive prototypes of project intake forms for budgeting. We were able to distribute these forms as examples to the staff across the center in order to easily communicate with them and gather their feedback.
4. Engaging stakeholders early
A key lesson that I learned was to engage stakeholders early. We were lucky to be tasked with very critical projects for the center that would impact pretty much everybody working in every division. Since we were working on such major projects, we were going to propose changes that would affect the budgeting, funding and future benchmarking of every media design project. We also wanted to leverage existing best practices and minimize disruption to their workflow. As newcomers to the Center, it was important for my partner and I to lean on the expertise of project managers and designers across the organization. In order to do this, we had to start getting their feedback early to ensure we would propose the most feasible plan.
5. Adapting to changing circumstances
Another lesson I learned was being able to adapt to changing circumstances. We came into our project expecting a ton of historical data ready for us to use. We wanted to build a complex statistical model, and had developed a project timeline and plan based on the data we were expecting to get. However, we soon realized that this data would not be available in the timeline that we needed. We had to shift gears and take a much more hands on approach in obtaining data. It was an extremely interesting experience to have to completely shift our initial plan and adapt along the way. Since we were working on allocating limited resources and building five-year plans, I learned a big lesson in developing strategy before developing tactics.
How have any of these skills deemed transferable and set you up for your next career move?
All of these skills and lessons I mentioned are really important and I’m really glad that the BPI put us in such positions of leadership.
Some of these lessons have already come to play. During my internship at Google last summer. I worked on building a training module for the Americas’ advertising sales team. One of the things I did right at the onset of my internship was getting to know the stakeholders early to make sure that their feedback was integrated into my project design. Once those conversations and relationships were built, I was able to lean on that expertise throughout the course of my internship.
In that project I also found that I was blending qualitative and quantitative insights. It was hard to prioritize resource and time allocation just based on quantitative data. Those interviews that I had undertaken with experienced team members ultimately helped me decide what was most useful to include in a training program.
What were your biggest takeaways during your NPS BPI experience?
I think it was wonderful to work for an organization that doesn’t just optimize for the bottom line, but also for people in society. I got to see how much effort the National Park Service puts into increasing access for people of all abilities from the way they design the textures of signs and exhibits to the ways in which they use VR and digital media to ensure people of different mobility levels can experience park resources and history.
Ultimately, I had a great time. The people that I worked with and my colleagues were extremely passionate people who love the national parks. I had the great privilege of living with three other interns and we did a lot of fun things together like hiking, tubing in the river after work, weekend backpacking trips and family dinners. It sounds cheesy but through the internship, I felt like I met so many people with a shared value system, and I think we’ll be lifelong friends. We’ve had a lot of follow up calls even a year after the internship. It’s a summer that I look back on fondly, and I’ll always treasure those memories.
If you have ever loved or taken an interest in national parks, this internship will help you see it from the inside out. You can really contribute your skills in a meaningful way because they’re putting you on projects with high impact. You are really given the authority and bandwidth to have as big of an impact as possible.
Whether or not you want to work at the NPS for the rest of your life, this is a great experience to jumpstart your career because you will work in a consulting capacity and meet so many ambitious, smart people.
Inspiring Capital is a NYC-based B Corp that offers learning and development services for professionals and organizations. Inspiring Capital’s mission is to guide people to meaningful lives. IC exists to give others the permission, invitations, tools, guidance, inspiration, and accountability that we all want and need to grow purposefully toward our wholehearted potential. So that, together, we can build healthier, fairer, more inclusive, equitable, just, and regenerative teams, organizations, societies, and economies.
Learn more about Inspiring Capital here.
Learn more about NPS BPI here.
Interested applying for the Summer 2021 NPS BPI program? Click here!
Watch an Informational Webinar on YouTube on all logistics of the Summer 2021 NPS BPI program here.
