RRSLA INTERNSHIP BLOG

 Hi Everyone!  I just got into the blog, but I enjoyed reading about everyones' experiences. I miss you studio peeps, but I do appreciate that the people at Carbo remind me of our studio culture. We go to lunch every Friday and this upcoming week, we are going to top golf as an office. They talk about random things throughout the day as an office and I really appreciate the time they have spent teaching me different things.  I have been enjoying work at Carbo during the week. While the ice day was not fun, I have enjoyed going by the river in the afternoons and seeing the sunset. Downtown is such an interesting place. People flock to the area during the day, yet at night, it remains pretty empty. I am hoping that some revitalization happens in the future. I always wonder why Baton Rouge does not borrow more from New Orleans' culture.  Carbo works on a large scale of projects and there is a head person over residential, institutional, and municipal. I think that I lean towards t

Hey y'all! I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying their internships! I'm writing from Music City itself, Nashville, Tennessee. I'm having a great time being back in my home state and trying to experience all that the city has to offer. I'm living and working in the Music Row area of Downtown Nashville where I get the pleasure of walking past record label offices and recording studios on my commute to work, which is pretty awesome! I'm just waiting for the day I see a country music star walking out of one of the buildings! I am currently interning at Page Duke Landscape Architects. It's a pretty small office with 8 full time employees (2 LSU Alums!) and 2 interns, including myself. Most of the firms work is high end residential, but they have also worked on a variety of other projects. All of the firms work is heavily influenced by historical styles and ideas and and if you know me, you know I love history! I've been able to try my hand at a number of dif

Hey people!  The past week was pretty wild with the winter storm. The office lost power on the first day, and then had network issues for a few days after. Since roads were dangerous, we got a few days off. My car was frozen shut anyway, so I couldn't leave if I wanted to! Ligularia really doesn't like the cold. One of the magnolias at the office also lost a big chunk. For a few weeks, I've been working on an assisted living facility up in Baltimore, for a company we've done work for in the past. The site has a huge 18' retaining wall that we're designing to make more interesting. We haven't started looking at plantings yet, but I'm excited to see what plants different from here we can use there. I'm also looking at drawing a few concepts for a pro bono project at a park up in North Baton Rouge called Gus Young Park. It used to have a pool, which got filled in because BREC doesn't like dealing with pools. I'm still gathering info on what amen

 Brrrrrr, So I moved to Texas thinking that snow would be the last thing I had to worry about but apparently not! When I tell you the past week has been up there with the worst weeks ever, please believe me. There was no steady food supply anywhere so if you wanted to eat you would have to search where the nearest place serving food is and then wait in line for hours. Not only that, my truck was frozen in place in the garage but that didn't matter too much anyway because the roads were closed anyway so I couldn't go to work all week. Fortunately, even though I couldn't go to work all week, I still got paid anyway. I now know that I wouldn't want to live in winter conditions like that for long periods of time. Not a big cold guy.. Thankfully I didn't have to go to the office because our water was shut off for 3 days due to busted pipes so you can probably imagine how great I smelt. As bad as I made this week out to be, It was low key kinda nice just sitting inside wa

We got off a few days for Mardi Gras this week even though there was no Mardi Gras. I've had some extra help in my office this week since the schools were closed down here this week for the holiday. Which basically means I didn't get much work done this week.  Been spending most of my time working on the Community Adaptation Program which is the program through the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority for homeowners to make improvements to their properties to help alleviate flooding, all of the interventions are green infrastructure.  One thing that we do as a part of the program is to provide the homeowner with a maintenance manual to help them understand what they need to do to take care of the new stuff. As part of the agreement, they have to maintain the property for five years so this helps them to understand what to do and not have to pay back any of the money they received. In the manual, there is a page that explains how much water is now captured on-site and to help the

Hey, hope everyone is doing well. The South has really had some strange weather this past week. Fortunately, Birmingham was not affected by the worst of the weather though it did snow for several hours Tuesday morning. I had to wait a couple of hours before going in to work to make sure the roads were safe, but it was fine. Work has continued on quite well. Still trying to push some CDs out of the door on a couple of projects before we open any new cans of worms. One that I focused on this week is a residence in Mountain Brook. Mountain Brook is fully developed and lots can no longer be subdivided, but this particular client found a house that was on a double lot, so they bought and resold the house, keeping the lot. The proposed residence pretty much maxes out the setback lines on the lot, and the grading is challenging on this site. I was happy to finally get to spend some time working on the grading plan this week for the house. We just need to get a few more details finalized, fini

       So far these past two weeks have been great. I took an Uber ride to Longmont, Colorado to visit Firestone Central Park that is extremely large. The entire park is around 290-320 acres of land that is squarely in the middle of town. The park also included a nice library that is near the middle of the site and oil refineries that feel way out of place. After our visit, I continued to help Jamie(who is from Australia) with measurements of different park amenities in other precedent parks that were nearly the same size in acres as our site.  Next trip, I rode with another Jamie(our technical principal) and Micah out to Colorado Springs, which is about a hour long drive from Denver, and went to Alamo Square Park. When we arrived to the site, it was outright, disgracefully cold. We saw many of the paving failures that transpired throughout the park as concrete and brick paving systems do not sit well with each other. Many of the isolation mortar joints were cracking, brick courses in

     Hey guys! I'm currently working here in Baton Rouge at Makaira Landscape. I've already been working there for two months (wow! time flies) and it's a very laid back and comfortable work place. I go into the office every week day and have occasionally used Google Remote Desktop at home. Everyone there is really nice and loves to joke around while we work. We also listen to music through the SONOS speakers and my boss loves to dance and be goofy, it reminds me of studio in a way. I don't know if y'all remember Haley's friend, Rebecca (from Cadence) that spoke to our class last year, but that is my boss's sister! It's really crazy how wide the landscape architecture community is and I've realized that making connections is important.       Makaira is a design/build firm that designs high-end residential pools and landscape. I've been learning more than I ever imagined about water features, prices/costs of materials, and pool design. My favorite

Hi everyone :)  I am going to be spending the next couple of months interning at Design Workshop in Aspen. I arrived here in early January and I am living on this ladies' ranch in Old Snowmass, which is about 20 minutes from Aspen. It's very cute and secluded out here. Her ranch is surrounded by mountains on all sides and the view is out of this world. I am very much enjoying the mountain life, but I miss being 5 minutes away from the nearest grocery store. Every morning when I wake up I talk a walk around the ranch to find new footprints and see which animals have been walking by. So far I have found plenty of rabbit, deer, and elk prints. My family came and visited me not too long ago and they took me skiing for the first time, I cried. Skiing is very scary, especially if your someone who hates falling to your death. But I got the hang of it eventually and I am determined to be a pro skier by the time I leave.  I have been going to the office on and off. I really enjoy workin

Hey everyone! Crazy to think I'm already in week 6 of my internship at Design Workshop. Is time flying by for anyone else?  Work: Work has kept me busy busy busy! I am still working on the same three projects since the last time I posted (2 Residential Properties + Intern Project). As mentioned in my previous post, I went on a site visit to Denver with Cana and Ashton. It was great to see a little bit of Denver as well as to catch up with Cana and check out the Denver office! It was an extremely long day for Ashton and I. We left Aspen at 7:30 am and I didn't get back to my apartment until 9 pm. We had a great day in Denver but an interesting journey back home. I soon realized I should've checked the weather a bit more thoroughly for the evening. Rookie mistake. Unfortunately, Ashton and I got caught in the middle of a snow storm on our way back. Took us 6 hours to get home. I had never been so nervous driving in my life. The roads basically turned from lanes into all whit

Hey guys, since my last post had a lack of photos so here are some from the last week or so. I got to work on one cool thing for EDSA so far and that was some archival work for Disney. That was fun. But it'll probably be the only thing for Disney that I'll work on. A lot of the themed industry is down right now. But we do have a lot of work for Shanghai, they have a couple of parks that are being done by EDSA.    This is my spot, the large black board is there to block the morning sun.  This is the common area/Paul's drafting area (Views of downtown oooOOoo) This is a view looking into the office from the common area. My spot is to the left. That's Megan who sits behind me. The conference room, Msoft Teams has basically rendered conference rooms useless. (The yellow building in the window is my apartment complex) A past project I checked on. Disney's Rivera Resort. (Super Pricy) Walkway from Magic Kingdom to the Grand Floridian. EDSA also did the fancy fence that yo

 Hello,  As some of you know, I have been waiting from my friend from Baton Rogue to move in with me, and now he is finally here. I've never been a person that's liked being alone so this is really nice that he is here now. I have been fairly busy at work. We are in a weird transition period so there hasn't been a terrible amount for me to do right now. With that being said, I have been asking a bunch of questions and kind of forcing my way on to site visits which have been been very good teaching lessons. It has been great so far. I hope everyone is doing great!!  Software I have been using: Photoshop Sketchup Indesign 

Hi guys! I'm working at TBG Partners in Austin, TX  (Jacob's sister works here ).  Everybody here is working remotely and probably will continue until March. Since I started working (Jan 11th) I've only been in the office once, unfortunately I didn't take any pictures but next time I will so can  see it, it is very nice! The first two or three weeks I was loaded  with a bunch of online meetings (orientation staff) which I've been learning a lot about how TBG works. The office hours are from 8:30 am to 6:30pm Monday to Thursday and Fridays 8:30am to 3:00pm.  We communicate using MS Teams, Ring Central, and The Roux (this is a TBG's website like employee's social media site).  The Austin office is separated ny three teams and each team is in charge of different projects, the team I'm working with at the moment is called "The Porcupettes" (not sure what that means but sounds funny to say it). So far I've been working in three projects which al

Hey guys! I'm working at Reich Associates here in BR. It's a pretty laid-back office, with a mixture of working in-office and at home. Including me, there are 6 people at Reich. A few weeks ago we started taking Fridays as half-days and adding an extra hour to the other days of the week, and we also do breakfast on Friday mornings, rotating who brings it. Since I've been here for a little while, I'm starting to see a few projects that I worked on concepts for start getting built (mostly residential projects). I'm also starting to work on concepts for some of the larger commercial projects lately, including some assisted living facilities and schools. I'm trying to go on site visits when I can to take some pictures, especially of the Water Campus park, because that fountain is insanely nice. Ya'll know I'm into computers and stuff, so maybe it's not super surprising that I found myself as the go-to IT guy. So far I've set up the conference room wi

Hey Guys! I hope everyone is enjoying their internships! I am interning at Design Workshop , which is located in Downtown Aspen, Colorado.  The office culture at Design Workshop is extremely laid back, which has made this experience even more enjoyable. For instance, Hours are flexible as long as you get the work done. Therefore,  I have been spending a lot of time skiing and exploring trails while the sun is out. Then, I finish working in the evening/ early morning. I have also had the opportunity to hike to site visits, which was my favorite task so far.  Everyone in the office has been super helpful and welcoming. (It helps that so many LSU alumni are in the office! ) Likewise, everyone I have met outside of the office has been welcoming as well. I am grateful to be in such a great location as I am able to walk to work/downtown. There is a great public transportation system here as well, which makes it easy to travel to all the different ski lifts! So far, I have spent a lot of time

 Yesterday marked two months that I've been working at Dana Brown & Associates. In that time I've only been to the office once on my first day to set up my computer. Since then I've worked at home from my office remotely, I've only encountered problems a couple of times with the VPN. I love working from home, it's very relaxed although, our youngest roommate can be a bit loud and just barges in the room whenever he wants. We communicate using google chat and google meet throughout the day, so if someone needs to show you something you can easily share the screen and show what's going on. It may not be as easy as being in person but enjoy it.   Most of my time has been spent working on two different projects in the office, one called Community Adaptation Program (CAP) and one called Water Wise Gulf South (WWGS). CAP is a grant offered to residents in the Gentilly neighborhood where they can receive $25,000 to improve their property with green infrastructure.

Hi friends! I hope that you are all doing well! I am writing to you all from Sandwich (yes, Sandwich), Massachusetts. I’m really enjoying the Cape Cod life so far, although, if I admit it, I am always a little bit cold. I spend my weekdays working at Bernice Wahler Landscapes. It is a small firm that focuses on high-end residential design. That being said, I think one of my favorite parts of the internship so far has been going on site visits. Whether I’m hiking through the woods, stumbling around on a construction site, or finding myself on a beach, I am definitely enjoying my time out and about. When in the office, I am usually joined by three other people and the sweetest black lab, Suey. I’ve really enjoyed the small office environment and getting to closely collaborate with my coworkers. Everyone at BWL is very kind, and I have already learned a lot. I haven’t been taking many pictures at work, but I will try to start soon. In my free time, I have enjoyed visiting some neat place