Summer internships are relatively common these days. More than 60% of college students who graduated last year completed an internship, according to a National Association of Colleges and Employers survey cited by the Washington Post.
Still, one might be surprised to find a college intern joining first responders on emergency calls. But that’s one of many things that 23-year-old Vinny Ciricola has been doing as part of his internship with Leland Township Fire & Rescue.
Ciricola said this internship is one of the last courses that he needs to complete before he earns a bachelor’s degree in public safety administration from Eastern Michigan University (EMU). He’ll move back downstate at the end of the summer and hopes to graduate in December. From there, he plans to enroll at a fire academy and get Emergency Medical Technical (EMT) training.
Ciricola moved to Leelanau County from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in May, and has been staying with Leland Fire Chief Dan Besson in Cedar. Besson also graduated from EMU with the same major, although he says that student internships were not a requirement of the program when he was enrolled there.
“I’ve always been interested in either being a firefighter or being a police officer,” Ciricola said. “When I found out (Besson) was the fire chief, I started asking him questions, got interested in it, and so I asked him if I could intern here.”
“The internship has been cool. I’ve been here about 11 weeks now. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve had to go on calls with them ... The chief told me the other day that he wants me to see more of the admin side too. So he might show me what he does,” Ciricola said.
Since he’s pursuing a career in public safety administration, Ciricola wants to eventually hold a leadership and management position in a police or fire department. However, reasoning that Ciricola needs a hands-on understanding on how these agencies operate, Besson hasn’t been focusing the internship solely on the administrative side of Leland Fire & Rescue.
Instead, Ciricola has been rotating between the department’s two locations in Lake Leelanau and Leland and getting paired up with various firefighters as they teach him about their roles. When the newspaper stopped by the Lake Leelanau station to meet the intern, for example, Ciricola was learning some medical practitioner skills from Lieutenant Chris Schelling, a trained paramedic.
“Our goal is to introduce him to what he’s going to learn in the academy, what’s going to be expected on the ground, but also get him experience as an administrator,” Besson said.
Another one of Ciricola’s assignments involved joining firefighters on call to a local home, responding to a suspected gas leak. He also joined one of the department’s fire trucks at Hancock Field on Union Street, ready to respond to an emergency during a Fourth of July fireworks display, and the county’s Marine Safety unit on patrol on the waters of Lake Michigan out of Leland Harbor.
“This is our first time with an intern,” Besson said. “We have one of our guys going through an apprenticeship program through Michigan Works! It was an EMTto- paramedic program. We were kind of the first ones in northern Michigan to put a program like that together. So, we’re not really afraid to go outside of the box a little bit. Vinny has an opportunity to set the trend for others (i.e., more interns). He’s learning from us, but we’re also learning it through him.”
Ciricola also serves in the Michigan Army National Guard, where he is a food service specialist. He has already completed basic training and plans to receive officer training after he graduates this year.
“For my long-term career, I want to do this and be in the military at the same time,” Ciricola said.
