ABOVE: Noah Vetter completes his presentation on his summer internship at Avery Weigh-Tronix before handing the mic off to Tammie Hested with Minnesota Valley Action Council (MVAC) Thursday morning during the Martin County/MVAC summer internship recognition program.

FAIRMONT–The latest batch of interns in the Martin County/Minnesota Valley Action Council (MVAC) summer internship program were recognized on Thursday morning at the Best Western in Fairmont. The program, now in its 13th year, is greatly supported by the Martin County Commissioners and coordinated for the most part by Tammie Hested.

Hested, a family resources coordinator for MVAC, aligns Martin County graduates who are now in a two or four-year college with internships at local businesses that match their area of study. The goal of the program is to help area graduates see the various employment opportunities available in their home communities in the hope that they may return to live and work someday. The internships are paid in part thanks to a contribution of $62,500 from the Martin County Commissioners.

“They see the value in investing in our future workforce,” Hested said on Thursday.

Along with four of the county commissioners and most of the interns, some of the employers who had interns were in attendance at Thursday’s gathering, as well as MVAC’s executive director and community service director and some staff of the South Central Work Force Council.

Hested noted that the success of the program has piqued the interest of some neighboring counties. Waseca County has modeled a program after Martin County’s and Hested said that Brown County is also trying to get the program up and running.

The main feature on Thursday was presentations from some of the 14 interns who shared what they worked on over the summer.

Noah Vetter attends the University of Minnesota-Duluth, where he will be a sophomore studying mechanical engineering. This summer he interned at Avery Weigh-Tronix. Vetter spoke about some wire tension meters that he worked on to help reduce the amount of time it takes to calibrate some machines.

“Manufacturing engineers are tasked to find processes to make it more efficient in the manufacturing process,” Vetter explained.

Macey Becker is another intern in the program who attends Southwest Minnesota State for business management and entrepreneurship and interned this summer at local non-profit, Imagine Martin.

“Most of the time non-profits don’t have the funds to pay for an intern so this program is awesome for that,” Hested said.

Becker shared some background on the non-profit which has a focus on the local arts and also spoke about some media projects she was involved with over the summer.

“I had the opportunity to work on the social media. I helped post on Facebook… created an Instagram account, made some TikToks and created a Link Tree so everything is compacted in one place. I also worked on the website,” Becker said.

Next up, McKayla Byers spoke about her experience interning at Easy Automation in Welcome. Byers will be entering her senior year at Minnesota State University-Mankato, where she is studying financial planning.

Byers said that one project that took up a lot of her time was a sales force email project which would help keep customer information in one spot.

Finally, Selma Bleess spoke about her experience interning with Martin Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD). Bless studies Environmental Studies at Bemidji State University.

After explaining what SWCD does, Bleess talked about her summer projects which included water sampling, working with native plant plots and putting together a Martin County parks brochure.

Other interns in this year’s program include Wyatt Kube, Gemini Studios; Jack Kosbab, Nu-Way; Wren Heille, Martin County Attorney’s Office; Corene Moeller, Center for Speciality Care; Jaxon Johnson, Lakes FM; Carissa Paxton, United Hospital District; Lillian Higgins, Fairmont Area Schools; Lucas Jagodzinske, Becker Financial Group; Piper Lebert, Bank Midwest and Blake Jagodzinski, Integrated Tax Services.

In closing Thursday’s recognition program, Hested highlighted some past interns, like Courtney Williams, who had interned with Fairmont Community Education and Recreation and is now employed as an activities manager at Goldfinch Estates in Fairmont, and Aaron Hendricks, who interned at Easy Automation and since graduating college, moved back and is now employed there.

“I think, hopefully, that this program shows the interns that there are opportunities here and others who have chosen to come back here, live here, work here and be a productive, tax-paying citizen,” Hested said.