After one week of internship, I have made a dive headlong into a highly interactive experience and met a lot of smart people. I am particularly surprised to see that so much work goes on outside of the normal design work.

Beginning with marketing, the busy and seemingly unpredictable schedules of Derick, Larry, and Amy have showed me how important marketing and public relations are to the company’s success. After shadowing Derick and meeting with Amy, it has been interesting to see these people scramble to meet deadlines, build relationships, and put together important presentations.

Meeting with Virginia and Robert has exposed me to the day to day operations that must exist to keep this office running smoothly.

Throughout the week I met several engineers, however my meetings with Wally and Marco were special highlights. I was exposed to the “art” of structural engineering and some of the tools that help make it come together: AutoCAD and RISA.

After meeting with all of these engineers, I have learned that the common denominator to good engineering practice is experience. The intuition that goes with the development and design of a building’s structure seems to require a lot of experience and knowledge of codes and standards.

I have learned a lot from everybody, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I would be learning about public relations and office management in addition to just engineering. Together, it seems like Haynes Whaley has their business running like a well oiled and well “engineered” machine and it really is a special experience to be a part of the office; I am eager to learn more from them over the next two weeks.

I arrive at 8:30 each morning and start reading engineering magazines or textbooks, or glance over old plans and see if they made any more sense today than they did yesterday. The plans are a lot like puzzles, each day I learn another thing about Engineering, which is like finding another piece of the puzzle, and the plans make more sense. It’s a thoroughly gratifying process.

At some point Derick pokes his head in, tells us who we (Daniel Tepper is the other intern) are meeting that day, and then we watch Derick take on some marketing errand, be it a conference call, editing a brochure, or setting up a lunch date. Eventually we are sent back to our office with a simple task, like cataloging newspaper articles, or more engineering reading, which (frankly) isn’t so simple, or looking up who’s who in the development world. We may go sit in on a meeting for marketing, or we may go meet with someone in the office and talk to them about what they do, or what project they are working on now.

So far we have met with Virginia (accounting), Marco (engineering), Wally (engineering), Robert (Chief Operating Officer), and though we have not yet met with Amy (marketing), I think I know what she and Kim do because we see them all of the time while shadowing Derick.

The day ends with more Derick-shadowing, another hour or so spent doing marketing chores or engineering reading, and then a satisfying but chilly walk to my car, and a perfectly straight drive home (I make one turn on my entire drive home).