Beyond providing professional development for interns, participating agencies also benefit from the program by being able to tap the resources of talented, motivated graduate students to help meet agency needs. This talent, moreover, is available at a very reasonable cost to the agencies. Some of these are posed and answered below in the context of the MPA Internship Program. Interns are generally assigned research of administrative duties by supervisors at the agencies for which they work.
Assignments differ from agency to agency, but always involve a meaningful learning experience.
The nature of duties varies widely depending on agency needs. Interns employed in municipal managers' offices, for example, work on a range of assignments from capital budgeting to handling citizen complaints. In other agencies, interns procure and analyze crime statistics, work on urban renewal plans, and evaluate the delivery of human services in target areas. There are three general categories of internship assignments. Long-term projects could last from several weeks to several months.