DME Interns

In this inspiring episode, we sit down with Candice Edwards, a seasoned leader in human resources and workforce development, to unpack her incredible journey through federal, state, and private sectors. From retail beginnings to rapid promotions within the VA and national recognition through the Young Gov Awards, Candice shares actionable insights for students and early-career professionals looking to break into impactful roles in government.Tune in to hear about:Building a meaningful HR career from the ground upThe power of networking, mentorship, and sorority/alumni communitiesTips on resumes, interviews, LinkedIn, and standing out as a job candidateWhy soft skills matter and how to grow themHow organizations like Young Government Leaders and SHRM can elevate your pathWhether you're curious about federal HR roles, seeking career advice, or exploring workforce development, this episode is full of gems you won’t want to miss.More resources: www.dmeinterns.org

Today I get the chance to talk with Paulina Riffley from transcription! We talk about her future career goals, the difference between in person internships and virtual ones, as well being a part of the military family community. I hope you enjoy! 

Today we talk to Rajiv Thummala, the Department Head for the Web Development Team! Join us as I learn some new web development terms, what it means to be a Department Head for the team, and some time management tips! 

Today we talk to the coordinating producer Meghna Dasgupta about her current role as well as tips for college students trying to apply for internships! 

Grace Yang is a motion graphics intern at the VA DME Internship where she creates videos about recent news, #VeteranOfTheDay posts and other graphic design projects. Grace graduated from the University of Maryland in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, criminal justice and criminology and is currently pursuing a certificate in video production from Montgomery College. Grace also works part-time at the Chinese Culture and Community Service Center where she maintains the website and helps create videos and graphics. Grace discovered video making through a creative writing class in high school. She liked the idea of going out and spending time creating videos that brought stories to the screen. While searching for the right internship for her, Grace saw the motion graphics intern position at the VA and applied for that position as her first pick and two others through the Virtual Student Federal Service (VSFS). For her work as a motion graphics intern, Grace’s experience in marketing and criminal justice helps her to apply different concepts and soft skills that she gained from her college classes to the motion graphics projects that she helps design and create for the VA. One of the projects that stands out to Grace the most is the video timeline she did of Chuck Yeager that she is proud to have worked on. Another thing that Grace mentions is how time management helps her to balance her busy day spent between classes, the internship and her job.

Claire Bednarski goes to the Ohio State University and is a senior studying international relations, diplomacy, public policy and Spanish. Claire has been in the DME internship for two years and has risen through the ranks to now hold the position of co-Social Media ELT where she manages social media content for the VA’s social media accounts. Claire says that one of her favorite things to do in the internship is the Content Calendar which makes social media posts that talk about the national holidays of the year for Veterans. Claire works on the graphics and captions of these posts and she says it is really important for Veterans to see them online because of the significant impact the military has had on their lives and to help honor their service. Since she will be graduating in a few months, Claire reflects on how her former positions as DH and DO of different departments helped her become a better social media ELT and explains how her leadership experience has taught her how to do things on her own and to ask more questions to leadership and other ELTs when she needs help or advice.

Parker Davis is a DME intern with the External Affairs Department and is also a senior studying international studies and political science at Virginia Military Institute where he is involved in a wide variety of different clubs and organizations. His responsibilities in External Affairs involve taking on projects or overloads from other departments in the VA, distributing them on Trello boards and sending them out to other team members which David and other External Affairs interns have to then monitor and make sure their drafts are posted in the right way. During his time at the internship, Davis has had the responsibility of keeping the projects in External Affairs up-to-date and tracking the timelines of the projects that he and other interns work on from beginning to end. Public relations is one of the reasons Davis joined External Affairs. External Affairs is a new department at the DME Internship and Davis says that he is still trying to figure out how to better serve in his role as “informant” to others interns and the Department Head in External Affairs.

Luna Chen is a web development intern pursing a Bachelor of Science degree in data science and mathematics at Northeastern University for next fall and is currently taking a gap year this year. Her gap year has proven to be very productive, using her time to work as a STEM intern at a philanthropic education research company, a product manager associate at an EdTech startup, organizing a hackathon (where web developers, graphic designers, and others in computer programming collaborate on software projects) and is a participant in Global Citizen Year Academy. For the VA, Luna is developing a CoStrategy and is learning about search engine optimization that improves the DME Interns website by making the website’s search suggestion rank higher on search engines. Before entering the DME Internship, Luna said she did not know much about search engine optimization but has learned more about it through her time at the internship which has expanded her knowledge of web development in general. Luna found the DME Internship while searching for it online during the application period in July and then found the web development internship with the Virtual Student Federal Student (VSFS) with the VA and applied for it. Despite the pandemic changing her plans for enrolling in Northeastern this spring, Luna says taking a gap year has been very productive for her and also beneficial because she is in a learning program with Global Citizen Year Academy. She is taking two classes, learning leadership skills and meeting new people from all over the world. The DME Internship has also helped Luna make connections on LinkedIn and learn how to create a profile that landed her other internships. For the future Luna is excited to participate with other web development interns on a priority project to help develop and design a new mobile app on the app store.

Erin Gallagher is a senior sociology major at Beloit College and is currently an intern at two internships: one with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as a graphic design division officer, and the other at the Wisconsin State Public Defender’s Office in Janesville, Wisconsin. Erin splits her time between schoolwork, her internships and at her job doing graphic design for her school’s library. She wants to pursue a law degree in Juris Doctor and Master of Social Work (JD/MSW) and eventually work on rehabilitating people in the criminal justice system. Erin learned about the Digital Media Engagement (DME) Internship Program at the VA through a Facebook message that her uncle had sent her that made her interested to apply for a position on the graphic design team. Erin’s willingness to branch out to her community of Veterans in Wisconsin and Michigan enabled her to diversify her experience and knowledge outside of her graphic design work. After completing several #VeteransOfTheDay graphics (VODs), Erin moved on to #ContentCalender graphics and logos, her favorite being Center for Women Veterans (CWV). Erin’s father was in the Army for 26-27 years and she remembers going to Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) centers with her family while growing up. In high school, she frequently volunteered at VFWs and at a nursing home that had many Veterans. Erin said that she enjoys talking to Veterans because of the opportunities she has at getting their stories heard through social work and at the internship. Her favorite project so far at the VA is the graphic she made for the Navy’s birthday, despite her father potentially being shocked because “he’s an Army man.” One of her favorite things at the internship is the interaction she gets with Veterans through interviews and also with other interns, supervisors and also being interviewed by Shannon for this podcast. By the end of her time at the VA internship, Erin hopes to have made plenty of connections that she can later refer to for help, advice and direction in the future, and have made friends to meet with and visit them in their cities.

Dominique Ramirez is responsible for beginning the DME Intern Podcast, and he works in the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs and is the Intern Program Manager on the Digital Media Engagement team, working mostly as a Public Affairs Specialist and in technology on the VA website. Dom had also spent ten years in the Navy and had started the Virtual Student Federal Service program with the VA a long time ago and is surprised at the growth and success with which the program has achieved. In addition to his many responsibilities in Public Affairs, Dominique works alongside other people within the VA, making sure that certain documents are accessible for veterans with disabilities, managing 300 interns and answering questions from different teams. Returning after leaving the Digital Media Engagement team meant that Dom had to reboot the VSFW program, a program that is run by the Department of State that provides a platform for federal employees to acquire the assistance of interns to work on projects with them. In 2016, the program only had 16 interns in total and from there Dom expanded the program by bringing back the DME interns that he had originally worked with before. Knowing that the task of overseeing 300 interns would be too much for one individual, Dom made the decision to make leadership positions within the different departments. Dom’s military experience on a destroyer led him to base the command structure of the DME Internship around command positions on a ship like Division Officers, Department Heads, Executive Officers and Commanding Officers. You can find Dom participating with other interns on Slack, for instance, on the #RoseThornBudThursday posts that allows interns to share a good experience (a Rose), a challenge they faced (a Thorn) or something they are looking forward to in the future (a Bud). Dom is a huge fan of the DME Intern Podcast and says that, “As many as possible of the interns on the team should take you up on your offer and sit down for an interview on the podcast because it really gives me the chance to get to know you guys better.”

Atifa Hoque is a longtime veteran of the DME Internship, spending two years as a social media intern in her first year and executive leadership team intern for social media in her second year. Atifa had originally selected three other internships to apply to before receiving an email from Dom Ramirez, the program head manager of the DME Internship, to join the social media team with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Leadership has changed over the years since Atifa had started the DME Internship in the Summer of 2018, like the new leadership positions that opened up and the large number of new interns that joined in her second year. Atifa was later offered the leadership position of Social Media ELT and said that her new transition involved overseeing and managing metrics, training new interns, signing forms, as well as drafting and scheduling social media posts. The VA’s Social Media posts are primarily concerned with reaching out to veterans and their families to provide them with information that can help them in everyday life. The VA’s medical and health care centers offer such help and support to veterans. Atifa said that social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are used to spread Veteran resources and social media posts like the #VeteranOfTheDay posts, Anniversary/Remembrance posts and daily VA Blog Posts.

Catherine Del Fierro goes to Cal Poly Pomona and is a business administration major with a concentration in business management and human resources; she has also worked as a background investigator, running background checks for clients. In the future, Catherine hopes to work at a company with a thriving work environment but ultimately wants to become a professor. Catherine wanted to get more HR experience and found out about the VA’s DME Internship through a virtual career fair at her college. There she learned about the benefits and scholarships that the DME Internship offers. Catherine is especially concerned about the recent arrival of virtual learning, which poses another challenge and opportunity for Catherine to engage with more students and professors online through her experience in Human Resources.

Sarah Concepcion is the Co-Department Head of the writing department at the DME Internship. Sarah got her bachelor’s degree in English at George Mason University in Virginia and is currently working on getting her master’s degree in History. Sarah finds the changes from the pandemic not detrimental to having a community with other interns and the virtual office hours that she and her other CO-DH have at the end of each month help open up discussion or questions writing interns might have. Sarah was also active member in the Folger’s Shakespeare Library which is one of the largest collections of Shakespeare’s work in the world. Sarah said she wanted to join the writing department because it is “simple outlining of a person’s life, explaining what they do and how their service was important. It also gives the public an idea of the types of variations there are in military service.” Her responsibilities as a Department Head include reviewing the metrics of intern’s writing projects and deciding what would best help new interns.

Guillermo Osorio is a DME writing intern from San Antonia, Texas. Guillermo was in the Marine Corps and Army from 2008-2009, and was also awarded the Army Achievement Award, Army Commendation Medal, Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, Iraq Campaign Medal and the National Defense Service Medal. Guillermo found out about the DME Internship through his university’s website and thought joining would look good with his communications degree that he received from Ohio State University and the University of Maryland Global Campus. Guillermo works on the Borne the Battle Podcast and finds his work meaningful in many ways to veterans like him. The Borne the Battle podcast invites veterans to be interviewed by the host, Tanner Iskra, that is later reviewed by the transcription team and Guillermo and other writing interns who listen to the podcast and come up with a story to be put in the Borne the Battle blog. Guillermo is a member of the Student Veterans of America, which is an organization of veterans that have served in the military and want to transfer some of their academic skills into the professional and academic world. The group instills leadership and communications skills to their many chapters in academic institutions. One of the things that Guillermo says will help new interns who want to join the DME Internship is to “make the most of the experience, make the most of the work and the learning as much of whatever program you’re trained in.” The experience of this internship will help you not only in the classroom but later on in life in whatever field that looks for the experience and skills Guillermo and others have gained through their dedication with the internship every day.

This is Sarah Kowalewski’s second year with the DME internship as a graphic design intern. Sarah’s interest in veterans began when a family friend, who served in the Vietnam War and had dealt with PTSD, inspired Sarah to take the first step to helping veterans. Her job as a graphic design intern involves creating #VeteranOfTheDay, A Veterans Story and Veteran Resources graphics, as well as overseeing other projects by new interns. #VeteranOfTheDay posts, or VODs, are collaborated on Trello and crafted by many departments which showcase the life and valor of a selected veteran. The graphic design team has to find good quality pictures of the veteran and display their medals and the branch of the military that veteran has served in. Sarah is also a co-division officer of Veteran Resources where she helps gather and approve resources and puts together a weekly newsletter that goes out every week on the VA website.

Ivan Shires is a senior that studies Computer and Information Systems and minors in Digital Data Storytelling at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. As a web analytics intern at the DME internship program, Ivan’s daily tasks include making the DME Interns website run better by improving the accessibility for users, checking the content quality of the website and lowering the bounce rate (leaving one page of a website and going to another) by keeping people engaged with the content and graphics of the website. His duties as head of the analytics department include making sure everyone is on track with their web analytics training, weekly reports and knows how to use programs like Tableau and Google Analytics for their projects.

Alexys Santiago is a second-year student at Gallaudet University, a private university for the education of the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington, D.C. Santiago is currently majoring in public health and is considering becoming an audiologist or researcher when she enrolls in graduate school. Santiago is part of the research team at the DME internship. Her responsibility as a research intern entails finding articles about veterans, verifying them with other sources to determine whether the articles are plagiarized or not. She says that communication on Slack is important for fostering a better community with fellow interns.

Elizabeth Manriquez is a first-year intern with the DME program and is part of the Born to Battle podcast transcription team. For Elizabeth, transcription is very “relaxing” and “meditative” compared to her college classes. In high school, Elizabeth was the Salutatorian for her graduating class during the pandemic and remembers the strange graduation she had online with her class. Elizabeth currently studies biochemistry at Texas University at Austin. Elizabeth wants to research medicine when she graduates and go to medical school.

Latesha Thornhill is a researcher and fact-checker at the DME internship. Latesha is from a military family and learned the importance of critical thinking and ethical, accurate storytelling from her father who was a Navy veteran. Majoring in Philosophy, Political Science and East Asian Studies led Latesha to join the research/fact-check team with the Virtual Student Federal Service (VSFS) VA internship.

In this episode of DME Intern Podcast, we have our special guest Duncan McGuigan. Duncan is a Swiss American citizen and currently attends Portland State. Both of Duncan’s parents are artists which may have influenced Duncan to work in different fields, such as art, education, and food service. Duncan is a European studies Major and wants to pursue a master degree in Berlin when he graduates. He wants to work in International Affairs or Public Relations (PR), preferably in Germany. Duncan hopes what he is learning from the DME internship can “solidify me as a responsible, capable adult.”