End Of the Road

It’s finally the end of the road, senior year. After all my time here I sit back and reflect on all the things I did this summer and try to collect all my thoughts as I go back to school.

Last week I was focused on the SquashBusters job, and I have to say it was a lot different than the Y Lab. I went from having a set of drawings that was less than 30 pages to having a 3 sets of drawings that all probably added up to 70 or 80 pages. Luckily there were not a lot of problems, but that is not meaning that everything went swimmingly. On Monday everything went pretty smoothly and it was just a normal day, but when Tuesday came we had an issue.

The front face of the brick that was being installed on the façade of the building did not line up flush with the blocking at the roof edge. Now this wouldn’t have been a problem if the blocking was a solid piece of wood (a 2x for instance), but it was 3 pieces of plywood fastened together. This made it so that it was harder to add an extra 2 inches on the edge to protrude off the face of the blocking more because if we had just carelessly drilled into the plywood from the side we may have split the plywood pieces. The following week, we were still trying to resolve the issue the most efficient way. Other than that the week went relatively smoothly. I also worked on Saturday for the Moses Brown Y Lab which is normally easy because not many subs come in on Saturdays.

Before I knew it, my last full week of work with the company for the summer was here. And it was pretty easy since both Superintendents were on site all week, so my burden lessened, but there was still Meeting Minutes and Schedules I had to update. As I look back on the summer I realized how much has changed from my first day back in May. I went from mainly focusing on one job to focusing on an array of jobs across the company. I enjoyed every second of it (even if the problems were stressful) and I hope that I can come back over winter break and do it again. From last summer to this summer a lot of stuff has changed. I can remember coming in clueless to a job site on my first day last year and thinking how am I supposed to learn all this different stuff and not forget. Now looking back over a year later, even if I do not know everything, I feel like I know exponentially more than when I first saw a job.

I can’t explain the difference in the level of confidence I have now from when I started because of how much it has grown. I want to thank everyone at NEC for helping and teaching me these past 2 summers. I couldn’t have learned so much without you guys. Thank you!