Over the summer of 2022, I interned at the Piedmont Design Group in Frederick, Maryland. I received this internship because of a connection with the vice president and a family member of mine. Piedmont Design Group is a small professional services firm specializing in land development and civil engineering in the states of Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Over the several months, I performed many different engineering tasks including creating various plats for county review, developing excel cost estimates for future projects, working on sewer connects in local projects, and collecting and surveying field data at various locations. My first day I was a tade nervous, as any new intern should be, but as days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, I became more comfortable with the work and the people and I am glad I had the opportunity to work at this company.
The biggest struggle I initially had was learning the main software that the company using which was Autocad Civil 3D. At first, it was very intimidating to even mess around with the software because there were so many different options within in and a lot of things to become comfortable with. But, it was necessary to know how to use this because everything done by this company using Autocad Civil 3D. So, I basically had to somewhat teach myself this because my site supervisor and other fellow project engineers did not have time to sit down and teach me every step of this software. It would have wasted too much time. As I practiced day by day, I soon quickly realized that this software was not actually all that bad once you get used to it and start using it everyday. Soon enough, I was creating various types of plats for the company and editing and reviewing drawings made by project and design engineerings. Although my major is mechanical engineering, which using a different type of software, I learned from this internship that I enjoy problem solving in Autocad and hope to do this in the future. Many times I would be assigned to create a type of drawing in Autocad that I wasn't 100% sure how to do, but I gave it my best try, had my supervisor look it over, and we eventually figured out where I had gone wrong or sometimes I had gotten it on my first try. This entire process was very rewarding because I had contributed greatly to the company.
The work that I've done here at this company has given me an appreciation for all the minute details that goes into submitting plats for county review. There is an important amount of precision and accuracy that is needed when designing these plats. For example, when done with a plat I would have to give it to my supervisor to sign, and then he had to give it to the CEO of Wormald Companies (which is who Piedmont works with), and then it gets sent of to the county for review. And most times, the county will send it back with a huge list of things to fix and then you have to do this process all over again. Also, I definitely have taken into consideration what a work day at an engineering company is like, tasks to complete and meetings to attend. This will help me guage what path I would like to take when searching for a job post-graduation. This practicum definitely affected my future plans because my supervisor would like me to consider employment in the future and I am very grateful for this. I feel like I have made a lot of connections through this internship which is very important in any field.