The End of an Internship

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Today marks the end of an internship. I wasn’t hired to be a marketing intern, but I ended up as one.

I was meant to spend half the summer in the office working with the estimating department and the other half working on a job site once it started. However, construction start dates are mercurial, and the job I was meant to be on was pushed back. Ultimately, estimating didn’t need much help, but the marketing department, who was one person, did. My last day was today and on Monday, an actual person with a marketing degree will be replacing me.

Looking back on the summer, I couldn’t be happier with how my internship turned out. Being in the office and working within marketing allowed me to interact with various departments and people, which allowed me to get an understanding of their role within the company and to get to know them. I had the opportunity to sit in on many meetings with office executives and help develop and establish marketing protocols, practices, and initiatives, like redesigning the business card. I worked closely with Hugo, who was the marketing department. He taught me a lot and while I could write a post of stuff that I learned directly from him, here are four things that I learned either directly or through observation:

1) Marketing is undervalued (at least in construction) 

In construction, marketing’s primary goal is managing the proposal process for projects and the production and delivery of proposals for projects. Without them, the company wouldn’t have any projects. Of course, it’s a team effort. Estimating is crucial for determining costs and submitting proposals, but marketing is responsible for managing it. In addition to this, they are responsible for putting together a statement of qualifications, monitoring and managing social media, producing internal communications, engaging in business development and data capture, coordinating the company swag store, and any design-related initiatives, like designing a new business card, creating a hardhat project sticker, a new email signature, a new letterhead, and whatever else may come up. When the main priority is getting proposals out, which takes all your focus before the deadline, it makes it extremely difficult to accomplish other things. Not only do I have a newfound respect for marketing, but I also can understand its value to a company. If I have the opportunity to have my own architecture firm, I will always value marketing and its role.

2) Adobe InDesign/Illustrator/Photoshop­ 

Hugo is an InDesign master, and a lot of marketing work is through InDesign. I knew how to use the program and learned it so that I could create my portfolio for graduate school, but over the past three months, I’ve learned how to utilize the program to its potential. I’ve realized the significance of parent pages, paragraph and character styles, the importance of packaging files, and many other things that will be useful in graduate school and afterward. Throughout my internship, Hugo also afforded me an hour each day for enrichment time, which I used to further my graphic education and complete the Linkedin Learning courses for InDesign and Illustrator.

3) What I need from the office

I don’t know how I will work in an office. While it wasn’t bad in any way, it is was what I assume to be a standard office with an open floor plan consisting of lines of desks. It does make for a challenging environment to concentrate in when there is a cacophony of sound from various phone calls and offices throughout the space. Is it possible to build an office space not dependent on air condition in the type of environments that we live in? I don’t enjoy sitting in a/c removed from the outside. I looked forward to my lunch breaks where I would go to the roof no matter how hot and humid it was. Additionally, I feel that I need a work place environment that leans more toward collaboration and communication than time spent in front of a computer. Perhaps it was in the nature of the work of what I was doing because a lot of architecture takes place in front of a computer. Maybe I am naïve, but I know that when I was teaching, no matter how difficult the students were on a given day, it still gave me joy. The question is where or how I can find those moments of joy not teaching. This summer, it was when I was designing something.

4) The Construction Industry

Without construction you couldn’t have architecture. Prior to this, I knew nothing about the construction industry or what it takes to get something built. I thought that once you designed the building it magically came to fruition a few years later. For one, I’ve learned the role of the general contractor and how they coordinate and execute the construction of a project. I’ve learned what’s appreciated from architects on the GC’s end and what makes life more difficult. I’ve learned various construction industry acronyms, how a project is put together, how estimating is done and the impact it has on getting a project, the importance of collecting and updating data for future reference, the role of good architectural photography of completed projects and a host of other small things.

5) It takes a lot of time and work to run a company

There is always something that needs to be done and future things that will need to be done. I imagine if you want the company to succeed, work becomes your life and your weekends exist as extensions of your work week. If you’re not doing it, nobody else is.

And with that, comes the end of an internship.