The city of Palm Coast is now offering paid internships for college students. It’s an effort to give them experience and keep them employed.

It's Jordan Myers goal to become an environmental planner and thanks to the city of Palm Coast's Internship Program, she's learning how to do the job right now.

“You're not just seeing someone else do it. They're teaching you how to do it yourself,” said Myers.

Myers is one of the first five interns the city hired, but they're aiming to fill 14 positions for Summer 2017.

The interns helped designed the program themselves by creating jobs in every department, including:

  • Communications
  • Human resources
  • Landscape architecture
  • Finance
  • Community development
  • Environmental science
  • Economic development
  • Video production
  • Utility
  • Public works
  • Information technology
  • Public administration
  • Parks & recreation
  • Sports management

“There really wasn't anything to do here as far as furthering their career," said human resources director Wendy Cullen. "So they would come here, they would go to school, leave to go to school and a lot of times they wouldn't come back. We have opportunities available for almost anybody in any field that would want to come back.”

The concrete job opportunities are open to anyone, but one of their main goals is to attract local graduates to stay in the city.

“When you go to look for a job, you need to have experience on your application. It helps you get that first job or second, third or promotions, or that next thing in your career,” said Cullen.

It also provides work in a county that had the worst unemployment rate in the state back in 2011 at 15.2 percent.

But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the rate has dropped to 5.7 percent as of November 2016.

"Just something that you know everyone thinks about is what is going to be my job after this, where is my income going to come from?" said intern Maeve Dineen. "The idea that this is going to help us in the future, this is going to make us competitive for the jobs that we're looking for. I think we've all been very blessed with the opportunities that we've been given here."

The interns are paid more than $13 an hour and are able to transfer the hours into college credit if they'd like.

“It's hard to get a job when you have no experience. But getting this experience, especially being here multiple times, has been fabulous. It's definitely helped," said Myers.

"The skills that I learned here, the communication, everything that goes a long with that, I think that's going to be used no matter what job you go into,"said Dineen.

The deadline for applying is February 10. So far the city said it has 100 applicants. More information is on the Palm Coast website.