Internships
Internships
The Lancaster County Emergency Management Agency (LEMA) Internship Program offers a highly competitive opportunity for students and recent graduates to gain hands-on experience in emergency planning, emergency operations, communications, and community preparedness in the Commonwealth's sixth largest county. In addition to highly substantive and meaningful projects, interns gain in-depth knowledge of the field by completing formal training courses, participating in exercises, providing support to incident and event management, and networking with emergency managers across the Commonwealth.
Since its inception dozens of highly qualified undergraduate students, graduate students, master degree graduates, PhD candidates, and other professionals have participated in Emergency Management Internship Program. Interns work for a minimum of ten weeks, though several interns have remained active in the Internship Program for over a year. We've recently expanded our internship program to include public health and data science interns as their projects focus on public health emergency preparedness, hospital and healthcare system preparedness, as well as mass-data science/analytics and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in emergencies.
Interns are assigned to one of four domains at LEMA:
Operational Readiness
Ensure that the Emergency Operations Center is fully functional and ready to activate in an emergency at a moment’s notice. This includes coordination of processes and procedures, implementation and maintenance of technology, and management of complex systems such as GIS mapping, mass data collection, collation & analysis, public emergency alerting, and EOC facilities and security.
Training & Exercise
Develop training and exercises to ensure emergency responders in the field and at the EOC are ready to coordinate and support emergency response.
Planning
Maintain the County's Emergency Operations Plans, coordinates Local Emergency Plans, and consults on a variety of Standard Operating Procedures.
Community Preparedness & Engagement
Work with our communities, engaging with local community emergency management coordinators (EMCs) and other local stakeholders to prepare Lancaster County for emergencies and disasters. The LEMA office engages with local partners using a variety of initiatives to ensure Lancastrians will be able to help once another after a disaster.