Many of us opted to spend our Tuesdays and Wednesdays interning at various firms, organizations, and agencies across the city this semester. I’m trying to spend this year learning more about transportation planning, so it was only appropriate that I intern with Sam Schwartz Engineering, a leading traffic engineering and planning firm here in New York City. While it can sometimes get difficult to balance both classes and work, the opportunity to see how an office is run firsthand and doing on-the-ground fieldwork for high-profile projects around the city has been an invaluable experience for me personally.
Lessons Learned
Between the 14 of us M.R.P. and M.L.A. students doing internships, many are in the private sector, but some are with public agencies and non-profit organizations. Because this semester has been so professional development focused, many of us found it useful to see the process of managing a public project from start to finish.
Siba, an M.R.P./M.L.A. dual degree student, chose to work at Stantec Consulting, an interdisciplinary engineering and design firm.
“At my internship, it is interesting to be in a very professional, corporate setting, specifically regarding the logistics and to see how work is divided. Getting to see how project management is actually done is an experience I’ve never really had before.”
– Siba El-Samra | Landscape Architecture | Stantec Consulting
Others opted to continue a relationship already built over the past summer. Anni, a 2nd-year M.R.P. participant, spoke highly of the mentorship aspect of her summer internship experience, which led to her continuing in the fall with Enterprise Community Partners.
“I went in…knowing almost nothing about affordable housing. But I learned a tremendous amount during my summer internship, and felt like there was much more to still understand both about the field and the organization, which is wide in its geographic and programmatic reach. More importantly, I found the relationship with my supervisor and others in the department incredibly rewarding – there was a real sense of mentorship and investment in my personal professional development. The people who I was supporting/who reviewed my work clearly invested time in providing feedback on my work, and also accounting for my personal interests – looping me in on meetings and incorporating my thoughts in choosing projects or deciding the direction of them. So a lot of staying on for the fall was wanting to develop these professional relationships.”
– Anni Zhu | City & Regional Planning | Enterprise
Being able to intern as a part of the program helped me break into a field that I didn’t come in knowing much about – transportation planning. I hope to complement this experience with previous internships in community planning to launch a career that combines integrates land use, alternative transportation and urban design.