Yesterday Red Wing Ignite hosted a “what I did over the summer” event for three interns who joined local businesses, a nonprofit and Goodhue county to help organizations make better use of technology. Red Wing coordinated the internship effort with funding support from the Blandin Foundation.

The project was a great success. The students all said they learned a lot. The businesses were all ready to sign up for next year. Someone asked the students if their friends participated in similar internship programs. The answer ranged from no – to yes but working in larger companies where they aren’t trusted with as many challenges. Their contemporaries did data entry – while these students built websites.

A nice bonus was that they each have experience in Red Wing – great promotion for the town.

Here’s info on each project:

Mikayla Lawrence  worked with a local business to create a new e-commerce website. She used WordPress and Woo Commerce for the first time. Creating a small shop to start and building to a shop with thousands of products.

Belle Sahn worked to help prepare a local business for a large CRM migration. He came up with and started a process that help assess the needs of the users the status of existing content – in many, many places and was able to inventory what was worth keeping and what more was needed.

Jonah Tuchow worked with the County to create a web application to manage their county cars. Now employees can check out the car, not delete other people’s reservations, track mileage and a whole host of other features.