Interning With the Superintendent: A Senior Year Like No Other

Columbia University student handled a school district branding project and legislative advocacy as an intern with superintendent

When D.T. Magee, the superintendent in Norwalk, Iowa, asked me to be his intern the spring before my senior year of high school, I hesitated. The upcoming year, with its weighty decisions and intense implications, loomed over me.

I had been groomed to believe that each aspect of my final year of school would dictate my future — from the classes I took and the grades I received, to the colleges I applied to and the offer of admission I accepted. Every extracurricular activity, every class, every job and volunteer opportunity, practically every choice, seemed high stakes. And by overthinking the consequences, I made them higher.

The internet suggested that internships should help me try out a career. While I had no idea what I wanted to do, I knew it didn’t involve public education. I had no interest in becoming a teacher or a principal, much less a superintendent. So why would I want to be an intern to one? But Superintendent Magee kindly pressed me to accept his offer, and I did, prepared for a year of what I hoped would be interesting, if tangential work.

Year of Exploration

The year that followed was anything but tangential. Though K-12 education wasn’t on my list of interests, politics, public service and marketing certainly were, and I was able to explore each over the year of my internship.

My first task with Superintendent Magee was to analyze the branding for the school district’s academics and student activities. This launched a yearlong process in which I was able to reimagine an image for our school district that drew on our past traditions while modernizing the design. As we gathered community input and attained the school board’s approval, I practiced community outreach and public relations, two hats I never realized a superintendent would wear.

Toward the end of the first semester, we added political advocacy to the internship, and I got to see another hidden side of a superintendent’s role. When the 2018 Iowa Legislature session opened in January, I helped organize a student day on Capitol Hill in Des Moines, where high schoolers and Norwalk school administrators faced off with the state legislature, under single-party control and newly emboldened against public schools. We discussed both large issues, such as defending public schools against voucher bills and renewing investment in student mental health programs, and more niche topics, such as aligning state-mandated academic calendars with the AP tests and Iowa universities. My educational inquiry now had expanded to politics as well.

On top of the political advocacy and branding experiences, my yearlong internship gave me opportunities to create new connections between the student body and administration. Superintendent Magee and I worked with the school district’s curriculum developers to set up meetings with students to discuss new class offerings. Later, we created a board of students to continually assess and report on student experience and identify areas for improvement to a districtwide committee of parents, faculty and administrators.

Looking back, the internship that I thought would only have suited a student interested in pursuing a career in education gave me the opportunity to dip my toe in almost every area of my interests and to build a better community for my classmates.

Diverse Opportunities

As I now know, there are few other positions that could offer as diverse an array of experiences to students as that of being an intern to their superintendent. Many high school students, like me, are uncertain what career they’ll pursue after college — or even what they’ll major in.

The superintendent’s role encompasses a wide variety of career interests. Superintendents serve as their district’s chief educator, marketer, crisis manager and political advocate. I was fortunate to watch Superintendent Magee put on each of these hats and even to try on a few of my own. It was a senior year well spent, one that prepared me for my future — whatever that may be.