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Internship, Montgomery Waston Harza Inc.
Summer 2000
During the summer of 2000, I interned in the IFO (Industrial and Federal Operations)
Department at Montgomery Watson, Inc. (now known as Montgomery Watson Harza, Inc.) in
Walnut Creek, CA, an international environmental engineering consultant company. Since
I was only a sophomore in high school at that time, my parents were reluctant about
letting me go interned at Montgomery Watson because I have never traveled out of San
Francisco alone and Walnut Creek is at least half an hour away from San Francisco
(where I was living at that time). But since the BART (train) station is right across
the street from the MWH building, my parents let me interned at MWH.
At that time, my interest was in civil engineering and interning at
Montgomery Watson opened me to another type of engineering that I have never heard of
but soon became interested in. It is an integration of civil and environmental
engineering; a field where you can help make the environment better by incorporating
green standards into public projects.
From my experiences as an intern at Montgomery Watson I learned that the
accomplishment of something is always through teamwork. I was in charge of a project,
which was to update the company's Hazardous Safety manual. I had to contact various
Program Health & Safety Coordinators within the company's United States offices to
retrieve any new MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) that they would like to add to the
manual. Some of my other tasks for the project were to contact the Graphics Department
about the design of the cover for the manual, and the Duplicating Department to make
copies of the manual to distribute it to all the Program Health & Safety Coordinators.
In order to accomplished the project, everyone that is involved must contribute (take
an active part in it) or it will curtail the project.
I was also in charge of cataloguing, updating and maintaining the IFO
Department's off-site storage listing, and compiling the Small Business Reporting for
various federal government reports. For the off-site storage task, I had to retrieved
folders and files from their cabinet at the MWH office and cataloged them onto excel
spreadsheet. After that I would pack them into boxes, labeled them, and contact the
storage company to come pick it up to be put into MWH's off-site storage facility. As for
the Small Business Reporting, my task is to gather the invoices for a particular project
during a particular time period and input the name of project, date, invoice amount, etc
onto a spreadsheet.
We (the San Francisco high school interns) also got together with some
of the employees in the company twice a week to learn about the different tasks that the
employees do on the job and asked them questions about their experiences from being an
engineer. Overall, interning at Montgomery Watson was a rewarding and an invaluable
experience.
Revised 2/15/07
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