My Practicum Site was at the Columbia office of Mead & Hunt. This is a company that does architectural, engineering, planning, and construction services. My location specifically specialized in traffic/transportation and had me working as a GIS/traffic intern under Matt O’Connell.
I found this site through the career fairs at UMD. They were a great place to find places that wanted to hire interns, and with representatives from the companies actually being there in person, it was a great place for me to introduce myself and get to know people on the team to market myself. I found my internship practicum through the civil engineering career fair specifically, so I would definitely encourage other students to keep an eye out for when the career fairs related to your major are. This is a great way to up your chances of landing an internship, as everyone at those career fairs will be interested in what you are studying. The American Society of Civil engineers also has an annual networking event where civil engineering students can come to talk to professionals/companies in a more relaxed and informal environment. This is another place that a lot of my peers were able to find an internship, and I find that attending helps me to practice my networking skills and professional talking skills. .
During my internship, I utilized a lot of arcGIS online and arcGIS pro to create mapping deliverables for our branches’ clients. The mapping deliverables I made included static maps for project reports, interactive maps through experience builders, and overall project summaries with Storymaps. The interactive maps and Storymaps were often for larger groups of people/the public, so they were made with the goal of being as interactive as possible to present our mapping information. The main project I worked on was making maps for our big optimization project in Baltimore City. I was able to make a database to store all of our traffic/transportation maps relating to the traffic signals in Baltimore City that all of the Baltimore City Department of Transportation now has access to.
At this site, I was able to learn a lot about road infrastructure and was able to see how it affects the public/our society. I was able to learn what engineers work on to provide convenience for our society and also the choices they make to try and increase the safety/wellbeing of people. This internship was definitely a lot more technical, and not very related specifically to science for my group. However, I was able to further understand how our road infrastructure affects our daily lives. Through assignments from our clients and the tweaks they asked us to make, I was able to understand how the work we did impacted people’s daily routines and things like that.
Doing work at this site has definitely affected me career wise and major wise here at UMD. Before this internship, I did not have much experience with any disciplines of civil, so I was open to any/all opportunities to get some sort of work experience. However, being at this internship actually allowed me to discover that I don’t find the transportation side of civil engineering very interesting. I was also able to attend a conference at this internship that showed me GIS being used in other civil disciplines, and found the information/presentations on water resources the most interesting. Because of this, I was able to select the environmental track/water resources track for civil engineering. I was also able to thankfully find another internship more focused on this, as I will now be working as a water resources engineer over the summer for HNTB. I think that without this internship, I would not have been able to discover I liked GIS and I would not have been able to narrow down my interests as fast.