My name is Noah Roberts and I am a rising sophomore majoring in course 11 with a passion for sustainable development and transportation. This summer I had the privilege to work alongside the incredible team at LivableStreets Alliance just a few streets away from campus in Cambridge. My official title for my role during this internship was the “Summer Transportation Planning Intern”.
To have a summer internship or job fly by is always a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, it is so sad to see this first step into my professional career move by just as I started to get the hang of things. However, the reason that things seemed to move so quickly was also because it was such an incredible opportunity.
The person that I am at the start of this summer is completely different from who I am as I write this today, almost three months later, and a big part of that is because of my time at LivableStreets Alliance. Focusing on just the personal growth aspects to start, having a summer job where I am working from multiple locations, including office space and other meeting spaces, proved to provide me with the exact taste of the professional world that I needed. Being able to witness how people interacted with each other and how a hybrid workplace is managed gave me a sense of curiosity, but also motivation to fulfill all of my tasks to the best of my ability. The part of the workplace that will stay with me the longest is the social environment that can be felt even on at-home work days. LivableStreets displayed to me what it is like to work for a company where people genuinely care about not just their work, but about each other as well. From communication norms to respecting each other’s time, to even just the way everyone would greet each other, I felt comfortable in the office since day one. This day-to-day compassion further emphasized the importance of effective communication in a workplace; these strong relationships were not just beneficial for interacting with others, but they were also crucial for ensuring that everyone was working to the best of their abilities. These lessons are something that I will take with me throughout my career no matter where I am.
Besides just the workplace itself, my role provided me with numerous opportunities to see many of the facets that go into an urban planning project. Throughout the summer, I worked to support the community engagement team during their efforts in the larger Columbia Road Redesign Project. For some background, Columbia Road is a high-traffic, important corridor that connects Franklin Park to Moakley Park in the Dorchester Neighborhood of Boston. After a combination of years of little to no improvement along the roadway alongside growing safety concerns, the city of Boston Began to work on designing a plan to redesign this street to both better serve the surrounding community and align with Boston’s overall mobility goals.
Before working on this project I had no idea of the massive scale of work that goes into every part of the planning process to ensure that things will be effective, equitable, and worthwhile. Though this project was and is still in the early stages, the amount of work and funding that has been deliberately put into community engagement was honestly surprising for me. Of course, it was relieving to see that the city is attempting its best to make sure all voices are heard, but the importance of these actions is even more so when compared to the urban renewal projects of the late 1900s in Boston that completely changed or even demolished communities without ever consulting the people that lived there. LivableStreets internalizes this idea, which allowed me to collect feedback from the community in various ways. Because the community is so diverse, I learned why so much funding was needed for this community outreach initiative. To try and have the maximum impact, data was collected via in-person surveys, public meetings, open houses, and email blasts, through local community leaders, and business owners. Each one of these methods required its plan, along with consultation from smaller community engagement teams made up of individuals from different parts of Columbia Road to see if the plan was going to work in the context of the environment.
As I began to understand and dive into the sheer amount of work that is required for a project of this scale to even start, I became more cognizant of the space around me. Not just about developments along Columbia Road, but around my hometown and Boston as a whole. Some so many individuals have passionate hopes for future improvements that are based on their lived experiences that it is difficult to cater to everyone’s needs. This becomes even more apparent during settings like public meetings, where everyone has the right to express their opinions and concerns. However, for large-scale changes to be made, there has to be compromise, which is something that I began to witness towards the end of my internship. The more that people listened to each other during meetings and truly attempted to understand why certain changes were being suggested, the more productive conversations resulted. What I enjoyed about these discussions was how even after the technical team researched the corridor, there were still specific things that they overlooked, which could only then be pointed out by residents who travel along the road every day.
My time at LivableStreets had profound impacts on not just who I am but has equipped me with an entire toolkit of ideas and strategies to utilize for any career path that I end up following. I know now that working on a project that I am passionate about, all while serving the community around me can be a reality.