Overview of Organization

The Nature Tourism Program of AgriLife Extension was first created in 2001, and it represents 254 counties in Texas.  AgriLife Extension Nature Tourism helps communities, landowners,  businesses, and travelers with nature-based recreation & tourism  skills, planning, development, management, and marketing.  The program provides educational programs for the public, private business-both for profit and non-profit, landowners, and community leaders.

Job Description

-Assisting with the development, delivery, and evaluation of the nature tourism educational program marketing, including use of online images, videos, audio, and webinars.
-Assisting with the development of educational materials for use by the nature tourism program’s clientele.
-Managing the nature tourism program website information and YouTube channel.

Benefits and Opportunities

This was an unpaid internship, but I was able to create my own schedule to meet the internship hours requirement.  I learned how to manage a website as well as edit videos and audio.  Also, it is a great way to gain networking opportunities and job references.

Qualifications

Some qualifications include:
-Enrollment as an undergraduate or graduate student at any major at an accredited college or university.
-Interest in wildlife and habitat management, tourism management, or business and marketing.
-Computer skills to work with website management, photo and video editing, and possibly GIS programs.
-Working independently with little supervision and completing tasks on time.
-Writing and editing skills.

Achievements

During my internship, I was given the main tasks of editing videos and managing the nature tourism website.  Editing videos required me to become familiar with video editing programs such as iMovie and GarageBand.  The videos were taken during a Costa Rica field training program for tourism professionals, landowners, and other community representatives to learn more about successful ecotourism and agritourism.  I spent a lot of time with these videos to make sure they included the most useful and interesting information, so that anyone who viewed the videos could feel as if they were experiencing the Costa Rica trip.  These videos were published on the nature tourism website and YouTube channel.When I completed the videos, I started working on the nature tourism website.  This task included learning how to use WordPress, which is a program used to create blogs and websites.  I read the entire website and made notes concerning necessary changes, such as grammatical errors or links that did not work.  Eventually the decision was made to completely rearrange the website to become more user friendly.  I made flow charts to demonstrate how the site could be arranged and organized.

Overall, it is exciting to know that the projects I worked on during my internship can be seen by people who view the website or the YouTube channel.