Working professionals and local businesses and organizations reached out Wednesday to the Rio Grande Valley’s next generation of workers at Rally in the Valley, an internship conference at the Brownsville Events Center.
“Be open in your minds and your hearts to what you’re going to hear here today because this is really about you,” interim Brownsville City Manager Helen Ramirez urged the high school juniors and seniors who attended.
The Texas Workforce Commission in collaboration with the City of Brownsville, Greater Brownsville Incentives Corp., Brownsville Independent School District and many others put on the conference, which promoted internships as a productive first step in starting a career.
Ramirez said she was there to represent the City of Brownsville and GBIC, of which she is the former executive director, essentially for economic development reasons.
“Their mission is to create jobs, bring companies, expand our companies and really support our talent, which is you all, and our educational institutions, but really kind of grow our economy, right, so that you all don’t have to think of leaving Brownsville to have a career, to have a job, to have a family, to have a living, to have a great life here,” she said.
“So that’s a big part of what we do every day. You know, if you think of purpose, that’s our purpose, and that’s why for the first time we have Rally in the Valley right here in Brownsville, Texas.” Ramirez said.
Ramirez stressed the value of partnerships, saying that things don’t happen by chance but by design.
“They happen through relationships through partnerships with the TWC and Cameron Works and all our educational institutions and our companies, right, calling them and saying hey, are you open to having an intern from our school district or our university. Would you open your doors to learning and to mentoring our students and really giving them the opportunity to find a career. Is that something you’d be interested in?” she said.
At that point she asked the audience how many of them knew what they wanted to do for a career as a sophomore in high school. Only a few raised their hands.
Ramirez said her own career started through an internship at age 15 in the engineering department of a hospital in Los Angeles, where she’s from. There she learned the beginnings of how to collaborate with a group of professionals on a team in a small office, she said.
“It was collaborative … how they took care of each other, because its not just about what you earn, it’s about who you work with, working as a team when you work for a company,” she told the students. “So for the City of Brownsville and for GBIC, how do you treat one another?” she asked,
“You know we talk about heart set and mind set. You can be smart up here but if it’s not in your heart, are you going to be happy in the career that you have? They talk about U.S. workers not being happy in what they do. So what’s your passion what’s your calling? How do you mesh the technical with how I treat my co-workers?”
“It’s not all about how do I make a living, it’s about purpose, how we treat each other in the workplace,” she said.
Before Ramirez spoke, Arlet Ramos, a Rivera Early College High School senior, said she hoped to find out about internships in business.
“I’m trying to go into marketing and real estate,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll stay here for college. I want to go to business school at Texas A&M in College Station, and while I’m in college start with my real estate. I’ve heard you can start small, with individual apartments, and go from there, like by myself or working for an agency, and use my marketing degree to do the marketing for them.”
Efren Fernandez, the human resources and civil service director for Cameron County, said his career in municipal government started with an internship.
“Many years ago I first got started in local government as an intern myself for the city of Brownsville, so that kind of set forward my career in government. Internships are good. I benefited from it myself,” he said.
He and Susie Marfileno, the assistant director, said they were interested in finding interns and had come to get more information.
