This summer (May – August 2023) I worked with Whiting Turner at Johns Hopkins Hospital main medical campus in east Baltimore. I worked directly with project engineers and project managers on the interior finishing teams in the south tower renovation and the north tower addition at the Children’s Medical Surgical center.
I completed different tasks everyday learning something new with every task I took on. I completed requests for information, takeoffs and drawing specifications. A request for information is when you ask the subcontractor or designer about something in the drawings or submittals. Takeoffs involve making sure the drawings match the orders that we submitted for materials. And drawing specifications means clarifying drawings and putting these clarifications is a ‘spec’ or specification file. I would also complete punch list items and quality checks which means I got the chance to walk around the site and make sure things were on track and matching with the drawings. This was a very large project, and I spent a decent amount of time out on the site. I oversaw logging and managing the temperatures from floor 4-8 to protect the install of the resinous flooring in the lab spaces. Along with working with my direct supervisors on the project management track I was able to get viable and helpful hands-on experience with the field team as well. With the field team I was able to help prepare for Maryland Occupational Safety and Health inspections as well as listen in on meetings with superintendents and subcontractors about the operations at hand.
By performing hands-on work with this company, I was able to witness firsthand socio-technical thinking or a link between things, persons, and events especially that is or is part of a chain of causation. This project, being the size that it was, had hundreds of people and technologies working together. I was fortunate to be on the project management side of it all and really began to understand the sheer size and amount of work that must go into even the smallest of tasks. Throughout my internship experiences, spanning both summer and winter, I gained a significantly heightened sense of self-awareness. I learned that I could persist and complete the jobs given to me, even in distracting and overwhelming workplaces. I realized I do a lot better when I have lots of tasks to complete. I had to practice these skills over the summer constantly as there were a plethora of other interns trying to learn as well and then again when I came back in the winter, had to adjust to a smaller intern cohort, transitioning from being one of fifteen to one of only three interns. I think after this specific internship experience, I would love to pursue the Science Technology Engineering and Policy minor and hope to get another internship experiencing the design side of civil engineering. I think this project played a huge roll in my professional development in the immediate future and in the long-term future. I think it exposed my strengths and weaknesses and how I can apply those in both my immediate career, in school, and in my future career, in the engineering field.
This project was very hands on and required a lot of team cooperation. I was one of fifteen interns with ages ranging from 17 to 22 this was a shock to me being on the younger side. I had to navigate different maturity levels not only with my fellow interns but also with my supervisors as well some employees were younger while others were much older. I had to learn how to navigate asking for help and how to from connections with all the members on my team regardless of their age. By the end of the summer, I was in a position where I felt comfortable asking for help and where others felt comfortable asking me for help. This is a familiar position that I had found myself in and think it helped my team’s ability to achieve its common goal of creating.
I would recommend a project like this to other SGC students. It was very hands on, and I am very proud of the work I got to do. I was never treated like “just an intern” and felt like I was really part of the team. Inters were taken on ‘fieldtrips’ and got to see other projects as well as the warehouses to understand the full scopes of these projects. We also completed many team building exercises and I got to experience so many different things not only when it came to our site but also when it came to construction in general. I am very grateful for this experience, everything that I learned and the amazing people I got to know.