The Lessons of Interning

Internships have become a right of passage for today’s brightest kids, and tomorrow’s most successful business men. If you’re like me, you understand the need to distinguish yourself from the pack at an earlier age than most of our peers.

By the age of 21, I had been working as an “Intern” in the same career field for over six years, almost a third of my life. Knowing at an early age that I wanted to pursue architecture, I began interning with architects and construction contractors in high school. Deciding to explore the rest of the field, I started interning with a real estate development and management company my second year of college.

I was advised by many when I first started interning that I should not forget the fact that I was a teenager and I had an entire lifetime to work, but my passion for architecture, and the desire to be successful before my peers, got in the way of me thinking clearly. It didn’t matter to me, I loved what I was doing, and the lessons I was learning were priceless.

Over time my passion for architecture began to dwindle. I was beginning to know the field way to well. I observed the developers and money men driving the blueprint, local building codes destroying the artistic integrity of the design, and most importantly the level of frustration that dominated the office culture. With long hours, inconsistent compensation, and the dream of actual design long gone, architecture for me was losing its glamor.

Still I stuck with it in school. Architecture was a passion, and I a determined man to fulfill my dream, a delusion that blinded me. I fought my way through my first two years of architecture school, knowing that I no longer wanted to be an architect, but a developer with an architectural background – something most developers do not have.

Being a very practical person, and already having insight into how the field worked, I could not get over how impractical our assignments were. Asked to design things that would never be built by any developer I continued to grow wary of architecture. I struggled my way through my third year of school with a lack of interest and motivation, and finally in the fall of my senior year quit my pursuit of architecture. The environment in which I witnessed as an intern in high school at an architecture office finally caught up with me.

My decision to quit my pursuit of an architecture major was a combination of many things. The realization that to be an architect required two more years of graduate school, combined with how much I was struggling to motivate myself in my last year of undergraduate work was a huge factor. I had taken free electives in City and Regional Planning, and absolutely loved the practicality of the field, the ease of which it naturally felt to me and its broad scope of which many careers it could lead to. I had also started working for a development company and loved every second on the job that I wasn’t doing typical intern work, and architecture didn’t allow me enough time to participate in the things that I actually enjoyed, the activities that actually provided realistic experience.

Additionally I started to develop a disdain for the collegiate education. This is a topic I will cover in a later post, but my frustration again grew with the lack of practicality most universities offer, and the inability to truly prepare their students for the real world. So I took this part into my own hands. I joined a fraternity, and moved my way up the ladder to eventually become president. I held a year round internship. I became active in local organizations, sitting on the Board of Trustees of a campus planning commission and at Hillel, the center for Jewish students at most universities. I became involved in the local community, volunteering almost thirty hours every quarter for the last two years.

All of these activities and experiences have prepared me more for the real world than anything I have ever learned in a classroom. I sit here today, now a construction management major, upset that I realized this so late (and that I added an extra year to college), but ever grateful that I started off early enough to be able to make these realizations. If I had failed to intern at an architect’s office until recently, I might not have realized that I wasn’t in love with architecture until I was already out of school, and if I had not started interning in other similar fields it would have taken me a lot longer to actually find what I actually wanted to do in life.