From student to professional: Internships that shape future designers

Internships are super important as somebody who's going through higher education. The summer I'm at 3North, which is in Richmond, Virginia. I think it's important to have an internship because it builds you in the process of getting connections and getting kind of your foot into work. When you're actually working at a firm, at an internship, you have clients and you're not designing for yourself, you're designing for the clients. Bringing that aspect of architecture sort of at the forefront of my mind going back in the fall is going to be super important. Really trying to think about the end user and sort of being intentional about the decisions you're making that will, in theory, affect people, even though there isn't a client that is sort of making that at the forefront of your mind. The knowledge that I'm learning here now, the fact that I've gotten that experience in the field hands on, would only help me once I graduated. And I'm trying to, gauge at a different, firm, like a job. I want to ask them “what are their values?”, “what do they see in their firm?” So I interned here the summer after my fourth year, and I absolutely loved the internship program we have here. So same program that Shenan and Dunya are doing. What was really impactful for me and what I took back to school, was getting to work on real projects in a real firm environment, getting to pitch things to not only my project team, but we ended up getting to pitch something to a client, which is like super special when you're in school. Being valued even as an intern, I felt the same as I do now as a designer. Like, my time is worth something to everyone here. My typical day is always changing. It sort of depends on the day, what I'm doing. Over the course of the summer, I've worked on existing conditions documentation, we are going on weekly site visits to both 3North projects in the city, as well as sort of Richmond iconic projects. And so today, we went to the Jefferson Hotel. The Jefferson Hotel is a historic hotel downtown has some of the most beautiful interiors in Richmond. These site visits are for us to sort of sketch and explore each project and then the surrounding sort of area in the city. I think about sketching as a way to display something that you cannot just see with your eye. It's a perspective, but you can see multiple rooms and how they start to speak to each other, you can sort of draw the experience of this space in a very different way than actually experiencing it. You know, students should take internships because they really teach you what you may or may not want in your profession for the future. and it's also just a great way to learn. Through school, specifically the School of Architecture, whether it was in classes or with professors you're trying to develop your design intuition and like some sort of like designed backbone so that when you're presented with making decisions, you're able to make them thoughtfully, carefully, to beautifully constructed buildings. Doing summer internship programs is just another way to build on that, to layer on it. You're given different problems, it's a different set of circumstances. It's just kind of trying to fit everything together, because the goal is to become a strong designer who really cares deeply about what they're making. You want to learn through everything that you're doing. And so, if you're able to do that in school, you're able to do that here.