RRSLA INTERNSHIP BLOG

Hey y'all! I hope all is well! I can not believe I have almost been at my internship for four months! Time really does fly bye when you are having a good time! I have been keeping busy at the office over the last couple of weeks working on renderings for several different projects, drawing base plans in AutoCAD, and my favorite building a SketchUp model for one of the firms projects in Texas!  This upcoming week at the office should be very exciting! We are taking one of our office "Learn and Lunches" out of the office this week and taking a trip to one of the local Nashville nurseries and having lunch at the farmer's market, which should be exciting! Also, my brother is coming to visit me this coming weekend and we should have a lot of fun running around Nashville together!  Overall, everything is still going well for me here in Nashville. Time has flown bye, and I am trying to enjoy every moment because the end is coming faster than I expected it too! I hope you are

 Hello Hello Hello.. I have been super busy with work these past few weeks! I have been working almost everyday to update a 3D model for my main project, Paradise Mesa Ranch . The architects keep making changes which often leads to the entire design shifting. This becomes extremely tedious when Sketchup is hardly ever responding. I don't want to know how many hours I have spent waiting for Sketchup to respond.  On top of the 3D model, I am to make 4 illustrative plans by Monday afternoon.( It's Friday😅) We are preparing for another client meeting next Thursday so the pressure is on. Client meetings are one of my favorite aspects of the design process because they give direction to move forward. I am super excited to walk the clients through the model and hear their comments next Thursday.  I finished this rendering in one day. (very proud 😄)  I am writing this on my lunch break before I jump back into rendering. Luckily, Emily Pixberg sits right behind me so she has been answ

Hi pals! I feel like the weather here has been ALL over the place. For the past few weeks, it has felt more rainy than usual. It also snowed a teeny tiny bit last Friday (not cool). The rainy days make the warm, sunny ones feel even better though! Plus, I think all of the plants are loving it. The office has felt a little hectic lately. I guess this borderline chaos is a good thing because it means a lot of people are looking for landscape design! I have been doing a lot of spring cleaning/organizing in the office to help everyone stay on top of things. We are currently switching over to a binder filing system for current projects, which will be a fun little downtime task. I feel like I have been learning a lot about AutoCAD and SketchUp lately, which is nice. I also think the office is planning on hiring a new intern sometime soon, so that is pretty exciting.  Since it has been warming up, construction rates are picking up again. This, along with all of the new clients, means that we

  Polly Project The other day Dana asked me to set up some base maps for a new project. No big deal, I knock it out and tell her it's ready. She then tells me to contact the client's contractor to set up an appointment for a site visit, apparently, they work with this group frequently. She introduces me via email and we discuss some times we can meet. I'm checking Dana's calendar and I message her and she tells me she's not going, you can take care of it. So it looks like I've got my first project all to myself.  I met with the contractor who introduced me to the client, we discussed what she wants to do. She is looking to reclaim the right away on the three city blocks she owns around her bar ( which I have spent numerous evenings enjoying whiskey and food) , rental properties, and home compound in the center.  She wants to remove most, if not all of the concrete sidewalks and replace them with permeable pavers, and install rain gardens along the buildings and

 Goodmorning Everyone,       Hope everyone had a great day yesterday ;). It seems as though our time on internships is coming to an end. Somewhat happy since in a month I would have been here a year! I have really caught my stride as of recent and Ryan even let me take the reigns on a small planting project for a client. I have come such a long way and wanting to learn how to do good planting plans has been my main motivation for working for Ryan. I finally feel I have a well rounded head-start on planting plans especially when it comes to a Louisiana Landscape. Our client wanted evergreen, topiary landscaping that required little to no maintenance. After seeing some of the precedents they showed us I started putting shapes together to get an idea of the way the plants can interact with the form of the house. After just doing this quick sketch they were able to give me feedback which was mostly really good. I had originally had the needlepoint as Japanese yew but thought it would outgr

Hey y'all! Is anyone else finding it so strange not to be cramming for finals? I'm really enjoying not going through that haha. Going back to a school schedule is really gonna be tough!  Work:  Not much new to report here. I am continuing to work on the site analysis for the project Bear Island. We are actually having a client meeting on Thursday to discuss the three concepts. The residence in Aspen is still at a stand still as we wait to hear back from the city. The other project in Jackson Hole, Bosshard Ranch, has been at a stand still as well for like the last two - three weeks. That pretty much sums things up. Leisure:  Two weekends ago, I visited the Colorado National Monument. It was freaking awesome to say the least. I purchased an America the Beautiful pass that gets me and three others into National Parks and other federally funded parks. Only $80. Totally worth it if you're visiting a few parks. I stopped in Grand Junction and popped in a couple of the stores dow

 Hello everyone,      Work has amped up again lately for these past couple of days has I've been transitioning from sketches to AutoCAD for a couple of weeks now. My team are finally in the stage of ironing out and refining our concept sketches for Firestone Central park in more detail, which is exciting. Our client has really enjoyed the fact that we've been working on advancing these concepts further along more than usual. This time around, I created 4 sections using AutoCAD that I'm looking forward to render sometime soon. For Alamo Square Park, we are pushing towards finishing up our 30% CD documents by the end of this month. I've worked on the existing conditions plan, site demolition plan, and the site materials plan. Last but not least, the Boulder Parks and Rec Master Plan workload has picked up a little as I'm now contacting different key benchmarking cities to retrieve accurate data. My team and I are trying to gather different statistics regarding park fa

Hey everyone! This blog is coming delayed because I've mostly been working on confidential projects lately. I wish I could talk about them, but it will need to wait until they move along further. Last Tuesday we had fun meeting up at Radio Bar, hosted by a guy from Anova. I got to finally see some people from school again, and meet a few people from different firms! The next day, Ryan from Anova came to the office and showed us a few furniture family concepts to get critiques. He's apparently making rounds to a lot of firms, to get LA opinions. The past few days we've thrown together a presentation for the owners of Bon Carre, a shopping mall up near Cortana. They're trying to renovate and turn it into a tech park to attract more tech and IT businesses. This all had to come together really quickly, but I think the results were really nice! This rendering is what I spent a majority of my time on, but we also included a pedestrian masterplan to improve connections on-site

 Hello everybody, Things are going as normal over here in Birmingham. Like Chris, I will be pretty sad when it's time to head back to Baton Rouge at the end of June. I really enjoy it here - both in the city and at the firm. I am looking forward to seeing y'all all again and getting this last year of school underway. I've finally got construction documents for two projects complete and ready to go out for pricing. One of the projects I mostly did the schematic design for (with input from the others as well) and the other took a schematic that Dave/Natali completed but have otherwise done almost all of the construction documents in their entirety. Below are some planting and grading plans for a Mountain Brook residence. I had a few of my friends over here ask me (because I'm from Louisiana) if we can do a crawfish boil sometime. Despite being from LA however, I've never personally done one, so if anybody has some good tips and instructions those would be of great hel

 Hey guys,      We are now on month 4 and I am already dreading having to leave this city. This is by far one of the best places I've ever been. For some reason every weekend leading up to this one have been pretty overcast and windy, but this weekend was so nice out. I got to lay by the pool and just take a break from the long work week. Work has picked up exponentially in the last couple of weeks because we picked up a ton of new projects which has ramped up the work load a ton. At first when we got busy I was kind of over whelmed but now that I know what I am supposed to be doing its going nicely. Being that busy makes the days and weeks go by so much faster in my opinion. I have recently done a couple site visits to some very nice houses in the hills. This one guy bought 3 properties and is tearing down a massive house on one of them just so he can put a tennis court there. It's truly crazy how much money some people have. So In a nutshell, work is awesome, Austin is incred

 Hi guys! These past weeks nothing has change much. I've been working with my team on CD and DD packages for different projects. I've been working a lot with photoshop and CAD, everybody has been really busy and working extra hours due to deadlines, so I've been trying to help with everything I can. Last weekend I went to visit San Antonio and somehow I like Austin better BUT I really enjoyed the riverwalk. It's like being in another place, the best part is walking along the river and crossing the bridges, I really loved it, wish every city has one of those. Now, that spring has already started I noticed that a lot of festivals and events are happening so I plan to go one or two and see how is it! On my next post I'll some pictures of it! :) 

Hello!! I am going home this week for a family wedding in Shreveport. I'm excited to see everyone, but mostly I am pumped to get some food! I have a plan mapped out in my head, I will get Popeyes as soon as I land, followed by panda express, and then crawfish and I will end the trip with some oysters. I am very excited too say the least. I have little to say about work right now; I took a few days off the past two weeks because I've had visitors. But, they have put me on a new project that I am really excited about because they are in the very early stages, so I can see the process from start to finish (hopefully). There seems to be a common theme with the rich people in Aspen demolishing their houses right now to build a new one complimented with some beautiful landscaping. So far, I have worked on three projects like this. It must be nice to have $money$. A week ago, DesignWorkshop had a meeting with the interns and asked us if we felt like we were learning a lot and improvin

  Hello everyone,  The past two weeks have not been too interesting I have been hoping on and off about 10 different things at once so it's been busy. Some of these things include the Air Force base in Tyndall, A golf course somewhere in central FL, and re-theming Boca West. They really needed a restructure and that has taken up most of my time. They seem to like every pitch but theming a resort for wealthy Floridians is.. well it's tough to say the least. (Retheming can mean a lot of different things. But my scope was to create a couple slogan's or words that would be advertised in vision of a logo or saying. It was a magnolia flower but I instantly threw it out and going with more of a wave structure or something. Maybe someone could help me here!) I haven't been to the parks in about four weeks which is the longest I haven't been since I'm down here. So I am going to Epcot on Friday after I get my first covid shot. (Pfizer) wooo. For anyone interested, on the

 hi hi,  I think this half way point is making me miss all of you even more. I am enjoying the office even though it has been raining the past 2 days and is looking like its not easing up anytime soon.  My work load comes with lulls.It is difficult to stay busy all of the time when our job isnt quite as important as deadlines. I try to read the room and reach out for assistance whenever I can.  This past week, I found out that the Carbo team will be working with BREC for the Expressway park and a universally accessible playground. I asked if I could join the meeting and that ended me with a position on the team. If we are prepared for anything... it is parks :) am i right?  I look forward to sharing that progress with you. I found out that I get to be ASLA VP next year and so that was good news. Jacob and I did not plan to run against each other, but I look forward to being a class liason and making our last year as enjoyable as possible.  I will be in touch soon, hopefully with more w

 APRIL 2021 This past week I had a few deadlines to work towards, which got a bit stressful at times. I had a deadline for a design review and a deadline for a client meeting. This was the first time I had to work a few extra hours, however, I was happy to help. Because Design Workshop has so many employees, I was able to have multiple people help me finish up. I helped with renderings, planting list, blooming diagrams and putting DD sheet sets together. I enjoy staying busy and feeling productive! Luckily, I was able to end this week with a long weekend spent with Jonathan. We had a relaxing weekend and got to spend some time with Ashton and her boyfriend, Tyler. The following week, I babysat Ashton's gorgeous cat, Suki. She is such an angel. 👼 This week, I am working on a series of details. I am currently working on a detail for a spa ( hot tub) , which has an infinity edge.  My project manager gave me some precedent images and a rough sketch that I am attempting to draft. I hop

MARCH 2021 Happy Spring, Everyone! In the past few weeks, I have become a lot more comfortable using CAD.(YAY) I have been working on a planting plan as well as some pricing diagrams. Thankfully, I was able to take a few days away from the computer to sketch concepts this week. I am learning a lot here at Design Workshop and I am forming great relationships with co-workers. Making connections has been one of the most exciting things about working at such a large firm.  I have been working on many different projects these past few weeks, jumping in to assist any project managers that need extra help.  The best moment of March was when Madeline came to visit! I had so much fun showing her some of my favorite spots! I also explored more spots close by Ashton, which were magical. It was so much fun spending time with the girlies. I can not wait for Madeline to come back to visit. I hope Alyssa makes a trip up here too. ♥️ I am so thankful for the time that I have spent here and so excited

Hey y'all! I hope everyone is doing well! The last week I have been very busy at the office working on drawing construction details for gates, mailboxes, a utility enclosures. I also got the opportunity to visit one of the firms older projects that is about to get some new additions and take pictures and measure some stuff. It was really awesome to get to see a project that has been finished and see plantings that have gotten to mature and really fill the space.  Over the past week we also had one of our bi-monthly office "Learn and Lunches" where we focused on talking about storm water. We were joined by one of the civil engineers the firm works with on a lot of different projects. During this lunch I was able to learn a lot about the storm water codes in the Nashville Metro area, and about the drastic changes in policy the area went through after the major flood event Nashville had in 2010. I remember when this flood happened, I was in 5th grade, and it was very interes

 Goodmorning Everyone,      I am still trying to catch up to everyone else, but you're in luck because I had a super eventful week. Most of the week was spent drawing planting plans by hand which is really helping with my drawing and my confidence. I have never really considered myself to be good drawing by-hand buts its really about practice and application. Anyways, I cleaned around the office and redid the flower beds. When all this was said and done we went to Covington to create a base map for a job were doing out there. It was really informative and it gave me a better understanding of how to create a base map from scratch. Were doing a terrace and decking on the back of the house. Wayne and I measured the whole house in a layout style to get enough for Ryan to design. There was a lot of terrain that we couldn't shoot grades for because there was 10 feet of elevation difference, but we got the grades we needed for our purposes. It was a fun drive and the owners of the pro

Hello,  Everyone. I am Ruichen Zhu.  Right now I find an internship in Shanghai. I think I will go back to LSU for the spring semester to finish my last years with you. I am looking forward to seeing you.   Sorry for I post my Blog late. let me share some pictures with you. The pictures show what our office looks like. Making some coffee.  They are working, and I am work and looking. My workspace. I did some volunteer with my friend.  I can make some new friends in this activity.    What I did is to help to do the planting. Learning some experience and Chinese name about flowers and grass. This is my friend in Shanghai. She graduated from Shanghai Jiao tong University this year.   The place' name is Wei Fang Yuan（潍坊园）  It a beautiful  community garden in Shanghai I hope you all have a great internship!  Stay 100% Safe wherever you are!