Intership: Week 1

Happy Halloween!

My final review is past and gone, thank goodness. I wasn't as prepared as I would have liked. I didn't have any perspectives as usual even though I know they are the most important because they weren't required and I'm just plain not good at them. I also ended up having to present earlier than I thought and therefore had to talk about the site information for our jurors which I wasn't prepared for and subsequently froze up and fumbled my presentation. I was also the first to be reviewed by a somewhat harsh critic so I was a little crushed afterwords. Whatever. It was a five week project so I guess I shouldn't have expected to make as much progress as in past quarters.

But now I'm a week into my internship and I'm enjoying it for the most part. Sitting in a chair and leaning in to see my computer screen makes me pretty stiff by the end of the day. I haven't gotten to do much architectural stuff yet, but I've been working on some marketing stuff. I have to keep a journal for the internship anyway so my first two posts are below. I know I need to be taking pictures, but it's kind of awkward to take pictures of people while they're working away and I'm supposed to be doing the same. I'll post when I take some.

Mark, the principle, is pretty cool but likes to give me crap. He does that to everyone, but I'm not as good with my comebacks yet. My mentor, David, has been pretty great too. I worry that I'm working too slowly and not making enough progress on my projects, but I'm learning and he hasn't said anything about it. I only have a month left which is unbelievable. Then back to SLO to earn some money and see my kitties!


Day One

Today I arrived and sat down with my mentor, David, and went over a few projects he had lined up for me. The first is updating the mailing list for their promotional materials. The second is a marketing magazine for their residential projects. This involves designing a layout that can be used again for their commercial and institutional projects later on. The third project is working on the submittal paperwork for an online architectural journal called Formness.
As the first two projects weren’t ready, I spent the day researching projects and putting together the submittal forms for each project. It was a good first project to get me familiar with the firm and their work. The firm had published 15 projects previously with a similar online journal, so I worked off of the submittal form for that project and resized all the same pictures.

Day Two

Today I continued work on the Formness submittal forms. I searched through their digital portfolio of press releases and photos to fill in as much detail as I could. After exhausting my resources, I printed a copy of the forms for each of the 15 projects for David and Mark to review.
David then put me to work helping Keith on the El Camino project. I was tasked with finding the spec sheets for a long list of plumbing fixtures the owner had purchased before bringing in Mark Horton Architecture for the remodel.