This was the *unofficial* first week of my internship. I am working this semester at LS3P, a large firm involved in a large diversity of market sectors, and I will be floating within the office working on a large variety of projects. This is my first internship, which means a big learning curve in the first few weeks, but I am excited to be at a firm with such a large array of opportunities. The few days were filled with introductions and lots of Revit tutorials but the next two weeks I jumped straight into schematic site planning  and design on a few different projects.

1|20 – 2 hrs of introductions and touring the office

1|21 – 3 hrs of Revit tutorials, 1 hr site planning for a taxi lot rest area

1|22 – 2 hrs of Revit tutorials, 2 hrs further developing the taxi lot rest area

1|23 – 4hrs of Revit tutorials

1|27 – 2 hrs of Revit tutorials, 2 hrs working on the facade of an apartment complex design (hand sketching)

1|28 – 3 hrs back on the taxi lot rest area but this time working on the possible configurations of a restroom building, 1 hr working on fixing up the “big model”. There is a large model of downtown Charleston that was put on display for a meeting and some pieces had fallen off and needed to be found/reattached.

1|29 – 4 hrs on the taxi lot rest area. This day was spent putting all the hand diagramming that I had done into Sketch-Up  and creating multiple variations of each.

1|30 – 4 hrs starting to research and become familiar with a site in Myrtle Beach. This is a site that was previously considered for a project that didn’t end up happening so the firm had lots of older material for me to go over. I also started looking into the company that is looking at building on the site and familiarizing myself with their current aesthetic and branding.

2|3 – 1 hr Revit tutorials, 3 hrs working on site diagramming for the Myrtle Beach project. I was comparing how the old proposed plans overlapped with the current projects needs. There is also a slope on the site down towards the water so I started to diagram in section to see how this could affect the overall layout of the building.

2|4 – FIRE ALARM! An alarm went off in the middle of the day, causing us to have to evacuate the building. We turned lemons into lemonade though and took the time to walk over down the street for a site visit. This worked out perfectly because I had just started doing research on precedents for this exact project so our little walk provided some extra inspiration. I ended up spending 2 hrs on the Myrtle Beach project (more sections), 1 hr on the site visit, and 1 hr on my precedent search.

2|5 – 4 hrs working on the Myrtle Beach project… kind of. Turns out that there might now be another project on the other half of the same site so I spent all of my time developing floor plan diagrams for this second project. A concept had already been developed so it was my task to work with this big idea, the site limitations, and the unique nature of this program (which is to be unannounced at this time). I also developed a series of axons to help explain my thoughts in the floor plan diagrams.

2|6 – 4 hrs working on a site plan for a new middle school. For this I photoshopped some images over the top of each other and then diagrammed car routes, bus routes, parking lots, and sports fields in illustrator. This ended up taking more time than expected because I ran into some computer trouble. The computer’s hard drive was totally full from the past few users and photoshop stopped working. Now I know the guys across the office in tech support!