Hi everyone! Sad to say goodbye to such a remarkable experience. This week was my last at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission. My time at MORPC has been a tremendous experience, which I will cherish for the rest of my career. This week, I got to end with a few very amazing opportunities and events. Specifically, I believe that my work with using GIS and helping develop their green infrastructure toolkit was an amazing opportunity to network with members of the community.

In this opportunity, I was able to spend my last few weeks going around Central Ohio to different communities and highlighting their green infrastructure initiatives. As someone who wants to work for the federal government, I believe this helped me get a good local perspective of how these agendas from the top actually make it local governments effectively. Implementation is a major issue for programs, so I absolutely loved being able to see the progress and tips that these communities offered. As I continue to advocate at various levels of government, I will surely take into account these incredible experiences and the different perspectives and voices that I heard along these last two weeks.

In another light, I was able to finish my work across the office, finishing a passion project of mine as I got to do a deep dive into a public policy development that would reauthorize the Economic Development Administration. As someone who is currently looking at congressional or EDA roles in the future, it was a match made in heaven when I was allowed to work on memos concerning this bill. Without a doubt, I am so happy that I got to do this work, so I am thankful once again to MORPC for allowing me to work on various subjects.

It will be a sad goodbye, but I can positively say that MORPC and their staff have been rock stars throughout this summer. I will truly miss the great people I met throughout my time there.