Behind the hustle and bustle of kids heading back to school, let us take a moment to wish Raleigh Water’s most recent group of interns good luck with their next goals—and give a big thank-you for their hard work.
You may have seen some of their faces pop up on our social media feeds over the past few weeks, but their contributions go far beyond that. Their work directly supports the Raleigh Water business plan, which is focused on delivering reliable, safe, and sustainable utility services while supporting customers, employees, and the community. The plan is guided by six key objectives: customer experience and satisfaction, employee leadership and development, enterprise resiliency, infrastructure strategy and performance, operational optimization, and regulatory and reliability performance.
We’re not sharing this to boast, but to highlight the lasting impact our interns have made.
- Hannah McCloskey and Max Li completed a Safety Needs Assessment that will guide the restructuring of our safety program helping to strengthen our goal of reducing accidents and injuries. Hannah will continue her work with Raleigh Water as part of the Performance and Quality Assurance Team.
- Leonard Johnson, a CIP summer intern, advanced our records management project by scanning paper plans and organizing them in OnBase which assists our business plan initiative of building a records management system.
- Tehya Weaver created revenue and expense tracking spreadsheets with built-in data visualizations to support supplemental requests and future budget planning which supports our goal to use data visualization for data-driven decisions.
- Sydney Best and Marcus Gibbs supported the setup of preventive maintenance for assets for our new bioenergy process which assists with our endeavor to enhance our asset management program.
- Rosa Guzman developed a data-driven research process that identified sewer blowback trends, creating a foundation for a forecasting tool that will help the City better protect residents and infrastructure which supports our mission to provide better customer experience.
- Jaylyn Durham prepared and issued invoices and other forms specific to the recipient businesses and assisted with our Industrial Waste Survey process, relieving some of the administrative load from the program.
- Thomas Tobul reviewed industry Slug Spill Plans against State and Federal requirements and coached industry reps through making any necessary changes; later he conducted an audit of our Septage Billing software, both of which help to further operational optimization of our processes.
- Tyler Mance focused on the transfer public infrastructure data from the Master Project List spreadsheet to Energov which transformed a process that usually took multiple days and required coordination between multiple reviewers to less than a minute. This supports our goal of both operational optimization and enhancing our development review processes.
- William Garrett and Imani Taylor were paired with analysts each week to gain knowledge and get hands on experience with several certified analysis methods performed in the lab to provide data reported to the state which aligns with Raleigh Water's desire to invest in our future by teaching and preparing future generations to join our workforce.
- Chayse Jones was partnered with our Assistant Director for wastewater to focus on inflow elimination, which is a business initiative for the department. Chayse’s studies in Marine Science/Oceanography made him a great choice to review contour mapping to identify manholes that could be subject to sheet flow or flooding during storm events.
- Paige Cook and Finley Cain worked with the inventory and warehouse team, ensuring Resource Recovery maintained adequate inventory levels to keep everything running smoothly. Their main job was to identify inventory with zero or close to zero quantities and ensure those items were replenished in a timely manner. This supports our recent endeavor to consolidate our warehouses to increase efficiency in our inventory processes.
- Janiya Douglas assisted with as-built and deed research and worked in IT-Pipes, reviewing extensive inspection records to ensure they are properly accounted for in the Raleigh master database, which serves as a foundation for sewer failure prediction models which supports our infrastructure and strategy performance objective. She also participated in several internal meetings to engage with staff and completed a tour of the Neuse River Resource Recovery Facility, where she learned about the city’s water treatment process and its environmental safeguards.
Wherever your next adventure takes you, we'll be cheering you on. Thanks for bringing your energy, curiosity and fresh ideas to the team this summer!
