Internship 2: Week 6 Daily Logs

{Day 24 - 05.10.11}

The weather’s considerably fair today as compared to yesterday’s unpleasant stirrings. I bet there’ll be a lot of activity in the site. With the completion of my required hours and final day looming, I can’t help but to feel nostalgic and relieved at the same time. My mentor greeted me with a rather sad news that he’s been thinking for a quite a while. He won’t be around in Thursday and Friday and most probably in my final day at the company. I had quite a time listening to the lecture of the two engineers during today’s site inspection yet somehow my mind’s been drifting off to what my mentor imparted earlier. I wish there is some kind of way I could make him feel special before my final day of completion that he won’t be witnessing.

{Day 25 - 05.11.11}

Today was a special day with my mentor. I am not quite sure whether he’ll be around in my final days at the company so my fellow interns and I invited him over a small merienda that late afternoon and even prepared a small gift of appreciation. Though we get to spend only an hour of casual talk with him, what things he imparted that moment was surely something. We talked about the industry, tips on starting out our early career and experience in the construction scene and even titbits of details about his personal life – the things you only share with quite a few intimate circles. I felt a pang when I realized my abrupt tendencies to refer to the people in the construction industry as hollow beings where only labour and money seemed to make their world go round. I failed to see at some degree that they are human beings as well.

{Day 26 - 05.12.11}

Our mentor is not present today so we’re a bit saddened and laid back. I walked into the office this morning to see a tableful of JACMI engineers and personalities from the architectural design consulting firm deliberating over issues. Their conversations can literally be heard as murmurs from across the room but just audible enough for me to listen quite intently. I was asked by an engineer to work on an architectural monitoring sheet that will be used for punchlisting in the mock-up floor of Tower 3. It’s a good thing I already ran a draft of it from the earlier weeks of this program.

{Day 27 - 05.13.11}

I literally spent the day buried over various plans of Tower 3 to work on the monitoring sheet I’ve been tasked to finish. I’ve had a few chat with some mates from class how they spent the entire summer program doing some punchlisting. It is ironic indeed how this just came up only in the last days of my internship. I am careering this monitoring sheet as I figured this’ll only be my legacy when I leave the company. Though it was just a simple task, I honestly had some great time studying the entire plans of Tower 3 in such depth. It felt like having an intimate time with the design consultants of the structure.