• 5 years ago
• Posted in:Life Off-Campus
• 0
• Author: patrickjoseph

By Sam Pham

Sam Pham is one of our awesome Community Ambassadors for the office of Off-Campus Living. In this post, she wrote about her internship experience and discussed some of her big takeaways.

This summer, I have an amazing opportunity to be become an intern at Suffolk Construction Company, one of the biggest construction firms in Boston with over 2,000 employees, building 10 out of 25 largest construction projects in Massachusetts and 10 office locations across the U.S., namely Boston, New York, Miami, West Palm Beach, Estero, Tampa, Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. The organization was founded in 1982 by John Fish, who is currently the Chairman and CEO of the company. One of the company’s notable projects this year is the luxury Encore Boston Harbor in Everette, MA along with the expansion of the Boston Children’s Hospital, the construction of a guitar-shaped Hollywood Hard Rock Hotel and many more (https://www.suffolk.com/projects).

What I have been doing so far

I have been attending meetings with my manager and the superintendent to better understand how they coordinate the project with the subcontractors and resolve daily problems that tend to arise in the field. Additionally, I am working on minor administrative tasks such as:

1. Inputting invoices to tracking log that we have to help monitor our budget
2. Uploading necessary documents such as permits, warranty with Operation and Maintenance manual for project closeout on Procore, our company’s project management software
3. Composing meeting minutes including making a calendar-view schedule from a pull-planning one for visualization
4. Learning about the industry and Construction Management in general including terminology, reading drawings, doing markups, physical properties of materials, etc.
5. Documenting necessary change events and orders on Procore to make sure our record is up-to-date
6. Applying conceptual knowledge that I learned at UMass Boston in Supply Chain Management to realistic work situations such as how to manage a project successfully from start to finish, verbal & non-verbal communication, etc.

Some other highlights of my Summer:

1. I had an opportunity to attend the Volunteer Day at the Ron Burton Training Village where all the interns at Suffolk Construction helped clean and brightened up the facility for a summer camp that would take place here.
2. I visited the Suffolk’s field office at the Logan Airport to learn more about their Terminal E project that is going to take place soon while walking around the site
3. Our team had a farewell party with one of our superintendents who started working for Suffolk since 1999 that was going to retire at the beginning of August.
4. I went to Revere Beach on the last weekend of July for the Annual International Sand Sculpting Contest (easy access with the Blue Line so I highly recommend!).
5. I also traveled up North to the Newburyport & Gloucester beaches for a little summer tan!

Challenges

Of course, language is still the number one problem for our international students. Adapting a new working environment which is more professional and restrictive can be challenging too, especially when the Code of Conduct of the company has 15 pages! Following the conversation during a meeting can be hard when you have limited access to the email exchanges and phone calls between the attendees. Since there is full-time staff, there were terms common amongst them that I didn’t know. So it is important to make sure you take notes of things that you need clarification on.