This content was published: April 9, 1998. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith Announces PCC Student Internships
Photos and Story by Mark Evertz
What: Samuel O’Brien and Tracie Mitchell, two PCC students who have completed short-term training programs through the Cascade Campus Skill Center, will be awarded internships with U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith. The Skill Center is responsible for changing the lives of many individuals who have been chronically unemployed, on assistance or without high school diplomas. The two will work in Sen. Smith’s Washington, D.C. office – Mitchell, a north Portland resident, begins this summer and O’Brien, who now lives in Beaverton, will start his internship in January.
Sen. Smith and the PCC Skill Center have a relationship that goes back to Smith’s time leading the Oregon Senate. He visited the Skill Center upon the invitation of then-Rep. Margaret Carter and was impressed with what he saw, declaring it a program that provides "a hand up, not a hand out." Subsequently, Smith announced his U. S. Senate candidacy kick-off campaign at the Skill Center in 1996. He has also been a featured speaker at one of the Skill Center completion ceremonies.
When: Wednesday, April 15, 2:30 p.m.
Where: Cascade Campus, Student Services Building atrium. 705 N. Killingsworth.
Who: Speakers include Samuel O’Brien and Tracie Mitchell, Sen. Gordon Smith, PCC President Dan Moriarty. Executive Dean Mildred Ollee will serve as emcee.
Details: Tracie Mitchell, a single mother of two, ages 11 and 4, returned to the Skill Center in January of 1997, after ending up in a series of dead-end jobs and for a while on public assistance. "Anyone – anyone can get in rut. I got out of it through the Skill Center, " she says. Mitchell, who served as the student speaker at her Skill Center graduation in March of 1997, is now working as a manufacturing quality technician at Tektronix while going to school part time in PCC’s Microelectronics Technology program.
Samuel O’Brien, age 18 and now a sophomore at PCC’s Cascade Campus, had dropped out of high school. He returned to school at the PCC Skill Center at "about the time I was to become a father," he says, at age 16. Encouraged by his instructors to continue his schooling, he enrolled full time at the Cascade Campus, taking transfer classes, while working as a drug store cashier and display stocker and a movie theater ticket taker. He expects to graduate from PCC this spring and will attend PSU in the fall to major in public relations. He has also written for the school student newspaper, The Bridge. Of the internship, O’Brien says, "As a young American, I relish the prospect of having firsthand exposure to the workings of our democracy at the highest level. This is especially so, since it will be an opportunity for me to represent the African American community, which is still emerging as an equal participant in our government’s affairs."